


Now and Later

by blindness



Category: NU'EST, Produce 101 (TV), Wanna One (Band)
Genre: Alternate Canon, Angst, Long, M/M, Parallel Universes, Slow Burn, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2018-08-28
Packaged: 2019-06-24 15:00:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 30,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15633060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blindness/pseuds/blindness
Summary: Jonghyun receives painful visions from a time beyond the present, a bittersweet gift that allows him to change his destiny.  He has yet to realize that the gift had been given at such great expense.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a new contributor exploring the world of fiction writing. Please follow my twitter if you'd like to read more like this at [@blindness_fic](https://twitter.com/blindness_fic). Kudos and/or comments are eternally appreciated. Thank you.

2017, August 6th.

_Destiny._  

What _is_ destiny?

_Destiny shouldn't be something you can change yourself._  

Kim Jonghyun’s thoughts clattered against the quiet of the night with a volume as loud as if he spoke them calling out from the street to anyone nearby, particularly those who also had the type of thoughts that kept them awake at this time.  He shuffled into the darkness of the night, sharply tucking his hands in the pocket of his ripped jeans.

_Destiny has no power after all...if its something you can just change with the grasp of a hand._

He unfastened his breath as he exhaled, loosening the muscles of his jaw which had been clenched in response to both the stagnant animosity inside and the crispness of the temperature he had underdressed for.  He focused his gaze down to his shoes as his feelings dispersed. He could just barely make out the white of his shoes against the blackness of the street in the cool early morning light.

_It’s not fair._

The buildings around him were clasped in darkness, shielded from the assault of daily life.  Ahead, the only refuge pierced into the darkness with a fluorescent glow. Jonghyun’s feet shifted towards its direction.  With thoughts enveloping his strength, he made his way to the convenience store at the end of the block.

_Everything was all my fault._

His hands stiffened further inside his pockets as he tilted his gaze behind him to check if he was alone.  He hadn’t gotten used to being followed, wanted even, for some time. It didn’t really bother him as much as he often felt it should.  He wondered, in a childish lapse of rationality, if perhaps, they had come a few years sooner, the bitterness of being ignored might not be such a permanent stain on the expression gracing his otherwise charming and small face.  And furthermore, the circumstances in which he became the type of person who quietly slips out of the house in the early hours of morning to walk aimlessly around the barren midnight of freshly developed Gangnam wouldn't have quite unfolded as they did.

_Destiny..._

Jonghyun had foolishly believed in destiny for so long, so sincerely, as if God had somehow taken a particular affection to him.  His thoughts cascaded backwards in time. It was then, he remembered, that the destiny he had invested all of his prayers into changed right before his eyes.  And it was then that a mere human hand simply reached out and grasped it, proving its powerlessness right before his eyes.

The tired, rusty collar bell roped to the handle of the glass door offered a feeble ring as Jonghyun slipped into the sterile light of the convenience store.  The anonymous kpop meandering through the speakers only barely offered a weak attempt at lifting the solemn of early morning. He traipsed the stunted aisles of the cramped store as if he hadn’t been in a convenience store like this a thousand times before, the smell of rancid ramyeon broth unwelcomingly dancing around his nose while he thumbed the tabs of chip bags.  Their colorful designs and images taunted seductively against the grim of the fluorescence, pressuring him in their objectivity to indulge. He felt the presence of the worker behind the counter a few feet away, and tilted to glance her way through the tangled fringe of his black hair. She was texting. Not looking. His gaze shifted back to the chips. He grabbed the closest bag to his hand and made his way around the aisle cap.  She seemed fairly young, perhaps even too young to be working the graveyard shift in a business neighborhood largely abandoned at night. Her eyes remained in their fixed position downward as she scrambled her fingers across the surface of her phone. Perhaps she was texting a friend, or even someone more.

_Had she seen me enter the store?_

Impulses of uncharacteristic vanity crept into his mind as if they were fleecing him from the sides.

_Perhaps she didn’t watch the show anyway._  

He thumbed the bag of junk food in his hand as he mentally laughed off his thoughts, chiding himself for even considering that anyone would recognize him when he had made it into the Top 11 after all.  He placed the chips onto the counter. Without her gaze even lifting, the transaction was processed.

_Look._

As he thumbed to place to his card back into his wallet, she finally glanced upward for the first time.  And yet, somehow, he couldn’t bring his eyes to meet hers as he shuffled with perhaps more energy than required to leave the store.

The night enclosed upon him again.

The buildings around him echoed his own personal growth.  The older, humbler buildings housing traditional shops lay unwanted like sores between new and imposing high rise apartments.  The newness was devoid of even the unremarkable character of the old neighborhoods, showing its true emptiness in the dead of night.  

_Why didn’t my hand reach?   Why was I so powerless?_

Ahead, he reached a crossing.  He mechanically approached, unfocused on his path as his gaze pressed further into his thoughts.  He almost didn’t see the headlights of an oncoming taxi, or the driver inside who was too inebriated to heed any of the legal suggestions to stop the car.

Almost.

_Everything just happened in front of me._

The taxi driver jerked to a halt about 30 centimeters from Jonghyun’s knee.  

_I couldn’t change anything._

Jonghyun peered nervously over the rim of the glowing lights at the driver at the wheel.  He tried to trace a working picture of the drunken old man’s face into his mind, screaming to do something other than stare blankly ahead as his thoughts maniacally raced through his mind.  The driver, leering and swaying in his seat, brazenly threw obscenities out of the open car window into the night, as indignance often proved the antidote for inebriation. Jonghyun found his feet carrying him away as grasped his bag of chips like a cartoonish talisman of protection.  A familiar bitterness crept across the palate of his mind as he swallowed his breath anxiously.

_Was it destiny who saved me just now?_

He pushed his eyelids closed as the invasive memories grasped at their borders.

_Or was it destiny who refused me just now?_

His breath freed itself from trappings in seeming fragments as he paced further.  On the road, he lost direction, his steps achieving full automaticity. He tumbled down the hill, his heart racing.  He knew the main road lay ahead. The thought of going further and further away from the house softly entered his mind as if his own thoughts turned against the pulsating blankness.

His overworked and tired body, a long-forgotten afterthought of the his anxiety-ridden mind, limbered forward as best it could, his bones seemingly clattering within the smallness of his physical frame.  His thoughts grew morose as he began to wonder what would happen if he had somehow died at the crossing from the carlessness of the drunken taxi driver. His mind filtered through abashedly narcissistic illusions of grieving people, guiltliy averting its gaze from his members as his seemingly unbidden end bludgeoned their professional career like a fist to the face.

_But...In the end, wouldn’t people accept it?_   _I’d be dead.  Nothing could change._  

He turned onto to the main road.  Ahead, a memory glittering in the fog of his dark thoughts called out to him from the night.  He hazily remembered that, meters away, there lied an underpass leading to a park adjacent the Han river.  He also remembered that he hadn’t been there in some time.

_At the park by the river…_

_I could at least have time to rest._

Minutes passed, seemingly wasted in thoughtlessness as he approached the crossing that would lead him to the underpass.As Jonghyun approached the crosswalk his gaze transfixed on the streetlights as they put on their usual show of allowing and restricting traffic, appearing remarkably cheerful against the empty street.  Abided by automation, he quickened his pace to meet the narrow crosswalk connecting each side of the wide road.

As he approached, his mind diverted to the sight ahead of a nondescript truck that barrelled through a stop light further up the road.  

Jonghyun squinted through the vehicle’s auroral front lights to see clearly the nonchalance of such a driver.  Like his own footsteps, the truck remained at an automatic pace. Approaching the pedestrian crossing, his eyes switched apprehensively between the other end of the crosswalk and the oncoming car.  He could see clearly now the shape of the driver’s head cradled upon his elbow, which was then propped against the windowsill of the driver’s seat.  He stepped onto the crossing, sending the signal of alertness to the driver of his intent to cross.  The pace of the truck stayed constant.

Jonghyun suddenly ached with the tiredness of his body as he stepped further into the road.  At such a time when he needed his facilities, sleep beckoned. He looked onto the driver again, as his ever exhaustive mind began to draw forth the fragments of the current situation, vaporizing from his facial expression as it grew to a look of dawning.

_Sleep.  Of course._

The truck continued onward.  The lights became brighter and brighter.

In a burst of adrenaline, Jonghyun broke into a sprint into the pedestrian crossing.  The lights of the oncoming vehicle flooded his vision.

_At the park by the river..._

Jonghyun snapped from his thoughts as waves of panic tickled the base of his neck.  Hadn’t he just tried to run? Surprised by his own still feet, he commanded them from the adrenaline surged base of his mind to lift, to run away now, but the seconds now stretched too long as though each were made of pouring syrup, his body now trapped in their distortion.  He tilted his gaze to the sky. The lights were suddenly brighter, as if golden, radiant light was bursting from all directions from the early morning sky. The chips he had been holding dropped from his hand as he helplessly faced the oncoming vehicle. Horror flooded his mind, and yet the presence of something deeper and stronger, which had undetectably taken its hold over the fairly young boy’s troubled mind, posioned him against the panic, grasping at his throat as he stood gagged in silence.

_I wonder, right now, if this is what everyone feels in the moments before they die_.

He closed his eyes after what seemed like minutes of effort, but must have been just a single second.

_What if this is my last chance?_

He squeezed his eyes shut as if they could freeze the moment.  The fear of imminence crawled over his skin like tiny insects from his fingertips upward.  Willpower fled, as did rationale.

_I want to change destiny.  I wanted to change everything._

As if opening an envelope from all sides, his heart cried out what he had sealed to time and regret.  The secrets he sealed away from him in his mind, holding the deepest memories he had left buried in his heart, were now free to rejoice and parade in their uncaging.  

From an even deeper stillness, where memories stayed sealed away even still, a distant, yearning, and yet consumingly familiar voice crept into his ear.

_Come._

His eyes flew open, right into the grill of the truck whose exhaust fumes now swirled into his headpsace, rushing with the sensation of billions of neurons imploding to dust.  Somehow, the superhuman adrenaline charge to his neurons only worked in such a way to provide the factual knowledge that, mathematically, he would never have time to make it out to the other side.

_Surrender._  

It was now, finally, his time to accept the inevitable.

The feeling of the truck impacting his body straight on, snapping his spine, tearing his skin from his body, and killing him on impact, never came.

\--

2011, November 16th.

The metallic sound of the alarm radiating from the cheap speakers of their manager's Samsung Note woke Jonghyun with a start.  

Looking over with a sigh, he considered himself lucky enough to wake up from the ringtone alone.  The delayed vibration of the phone would prove much more annoying, clattering its body with a locust buzz against the oak desk, in turn rattling the accompanying unwashed phone straps from various vacations and theme park visits.  He turned over from the wall to the other side of the room where Dongho, his room mate, was just now rustling awake. As he did every morning, Jonghyun guaged the readiness of the other boy to get out of bed and found his own odds predictably more favorable.

Jonghyun sprung from the bed, resigning himself to be the one to silence Bangkok City ringing out from the tin speakers.  His body felt almost unnaturally light that morning, as he mentally noted that perhaps the diet he was following to lose weight for debut could be working.  Dongho groaned sleepy sounds too distant from words to be understood. He ignored him as he made his way to the kitchen, reaching for the cheap box of brown rice green tea for breakfast.  

“Hnn,” he heard behind him.  He turned to see Aaron lazily entering the shared living space.  Jonghyun smiled politely in return.

“Hyung,” Jonghyun whispered courteously, “want some?” he said as he offered the box.  The other boy shook his head without making eye contact and headed for the fridge. Jonghyun kept the aimless smile plastered on his face, now directed at no one in particular.  

He hadn’t managed to get close to the other boy trainees at his company quite yet, despite knowing them for nearly a year.  He had been the first male trainee contracted by his company, and watched this modest apartment populate from one person to the handful he hoped would become his best companions.  He had long envied the boys at other companies he knew of, longing for littermates with which he could share his dreams. Now that they had arrived, it somehow didn’t quite measure up to his expectations.  Jonghyun always chalked it up to his clinical nervousness. Furthermore, he knew that whatever it was that he needed to make friends with his fellow trainees, brute force probably wasn’t it. He didn’t want to bother them too much, as they seemed to be content to their own lives.

Jonghyun poured the water from the kettle over the cheap paper tea bag tossed into his blue and grey argyle print Daiso mug as Aaron awkwardly busied himself in the space behind him, texting his friends back in America as he often did in the early hours of morning.  

“Youngmin-hyung,” Jonghyun furtively called out to the other, feeling foolish at using a Korean name that  Jonghyun often wondered Aaron even registered as being addressed by. “Did you remember the notice posted in the chat room last week?  Today’s the day two new guys are coming. Did you get a chance to meet them yet?” Aaron looked up with a preoccupied glance, blankly staring at Jonghyun as if Jonghyun had been talking to his cheap cup of tea.  “The two new trainees…” Jonghyun probed. Aaron’s searching eyes found their cue as he replied politely with a courteous smile, “I cleared out the other side of my room. Delivery men installed the bunk bed while we were at practice yesterday.  Everything’s ready for them.” Aaron finished with an affirmative nod and used his reply to excuse himself as he thumbed the foil lid of his instant noodles. Jonghyun exhaled slightly as anxious pressure released. Secretly, silently, he hoped that the two new members were a little easier to talk to.

Returning to his own bedroom, he was greeted by the soft bearishness of Dongho’s back as the other boy was finally up and getting dressed.  “Hey,” Jonghyun greeted the other who managed to somehow be born a couple months after him and yet double him in imposition. “Morning,” Dongho responded.  Jonghyun returned to his bed, perching from its ledge and leaving his tea to cool on the shelf nearby.

“Did you see what our director messaged us last week in the group chat?  Two new trainees are moving into the dorm,” Jonghyun said, to the back of the other boy.  “That’ll make five of us now. It’s like we’ll be a real batch,” he laughed. Dongho turned to the other, his eyes widening.  “Today?” he responded, “Ah, I didn’t notice it’s already today. I haven’t met them yet but I heard Youngmin-hyung met them in the company two days ago.  You should ask him,” Dongho continued, his mouth twisted to a smirk. “Get some dirt so we know what’s coming.” Jonghyun chuckled in response. “Youngmin-hyung doesn’t talk to me that much, or he doesn’t seem like the type to talk in general,” he replied, “I don’t know if we’re going to find out anything.”  Dongho pulled down the hem of his black practice shirt, somewhat dismayed that it still clung to the body deemed far too bearish to be that of an idol’s. His stomach growled in rebellion. “Hyung, try to keep in mind,” he replied as he filtered out the door, “people don’t really talk before they get their breakfast.”  He left the room, seemingly to see to that matter, as Jonghyun’s back sank against the bed.

He reached for his phone, his hand brushing over the shattered screen, and absently pressed the power button.  As the phone powered up, the vibration of a new message refocused his attention. He opened the group chat, barren with conversation due to the mutual agreement to abstain from clogging it up with personal conversation, and saw the trainee division director’s new message posted an hour prior.

“Today there will be two new trainees coming to live at Dorm C.  

The room currently inhabited by Kwak Youngmin should be thoroughly cleaned and the bed for the new trainees should have been installed yesterday.  The trainees will be bringing one suitcase of belongings each and as such, the left corner of the sun room should be cleared as well. Please confirm with Kwak Youngmin that the preparations have been made.  The trainees will come at 2:30 pm, and as such, C group trainees will be excused from practice by 2:00 pm.

Please reply in confirmation to this notice.”

Jonghyun’s mind hummed in anticipation as he placed his phone in his black practice bag.  He silently hoped that this peculiar feeling he had that today felt like the first day of something strange was a sign of the good things to come.

\--

It seemed that 2:30 had managed to arrive with less thought towards the newcomers than Jonghyun anticipated.  After all, practice was the only thing that so far proved effective at slinencing the anxiety that seemed to be streaming at all hours through the crevices his mind.  Only practice, it seemed, managed to erase the awkwardness and introversion that doggedly plagued the teenage boy since childhood. Throwing his all into this dream, could he finally imagine himself like his fellow trainees, reaching out for the same goal.

_This is my destiny,_ he sighed with a smile as he cleared the last of the clutter out from the sun room. He smiled quietly to himself as the trainees scattered throughout the home to oblige the message’s instructions in readying the house for the newcomers.  His thoughts were abruptly interrupted as the spiraling tone of the front door lockpad being pressed from the outside rang throughout the room, just as he pulled the sliding sun room door to a close.  Jonghyun whirled forward, comically standing in place as the unknown party granted themselves access from the electronic lockpad outside.

“Ah,” Dongho grunted as he tumbled out from the adjacent bedroom, somehow shirtless again.  Aaron also expectantly opened the door to his room wide, peering towards the front of the apartment with a rarely seen curiosity.

The front door pushed open, and four curious eyes peered back from the entrance.

“Hello?”

The greetings of the two new boys were met with silence.  Nerves tensing systematically in response to the awkwardness, Jonghyun cleared his throat.

“Welcome!  Come on in!” he choked out in artificial nonchalance.  

The new boys cast friendly gazes in response as they pressed the door open and began to shuffle in.  The first boy to enter peered forward inquisitively, with small but handsome eyes piercing through his remarkably shaggy dark hair.  He entered the living room, tucking his head in a friendly bow at the other three as he turned back towards the door. The second one wavered in the door frame as struggled a bit with his suitcase, lifting it over the door frame.  As he did so, his back ricocheted off the door’s face, propelling it forward from the shoe rack behind it, and his suitcase tumbled to the ground. “Ah-!” he exclaimed. The others gaped curiously at the second boy, who was now anxiously laughing and rubbing the impacted area of his back.  Jonghyun understood that he stood the closest, and so he accepted the inevitable task of being the first to approach, chuckling outwardly as he reached over to lift the fallen suitcase. Grasping it from the ground, his eyes lifted to meet the new trainee as he straightened upwards to the floor.

For a few seconds, their eyes locked in place.  The new boy quickly averted his eyes with a small embarrassed smile, but Jonghyun’s eyes lingered, frozen in their positions.  He couldn’t shake the feeling of familiarity somehow, as if he had somewhere seen this face before.

_I must have seen him before at the company._

He immediately felt an odd sort of fascination, the walls of his mind crept upon with unplaced recognition as he continue to stare awkwardly at the clumsy new trainee who dropped his suitcase in the doorway.  

Perhaps the feeling was coming from not from fascination alone, but from the deep waters of the as yet unknown areas of his mind, those areas Jonghyun managed to seal away from even himself.  

Jonghyun’s mind stopped short of that thought.  He squeezed his eyes shut, as if he could freeze the moment.

“Oh my god!  Sorry! Don’t strain yourself!”

The new boy exclaimed to him as he saw the unfamiliar boy wincing, “It’s heavy I know!  I shouldn’t have had you reach for it. I’m so sorry again,” he muttered nervously, clearly flustered at the awkward nature of his introduction.  The other new boy, who was now standing transfixed in the early section of the living room remained silent, calmly resting his curious gaze on Jonghyun.  As Jonghyun turned slightly from the clumsier one, he suddenly met his eyes. They furtively exchanged glances, the newer boy seeming remarkably slow in lowering his gaze.  Jonghyun kept a courteous smile on his face while his scattered thoughts dispersed to their corners.

Awkward silence fell over the room.

“So…I heard there’s three trainees and a manager living here,” the clumsy new boy announced enthusiastically into the empty air, “All guys?”  

No one replied as their gazes shifted between each other.

“I guess no one really cooks right?  Well….I’ve got some sesame oil and kimchi from home!” he exclaimed with overexuding positivity.  Dongho bit his chuckle as Aaron’s eyebrows cocked curiously. Jonghyun glanced from the other boys to the newcomers, no one immediately volunteering to respond.  

“Ah...” he said, his voice reaching for some sincere reaction, “thanks.”  

 

The new boy bit his lip and looked at him, nodding with his eyes racing.  Jonghyun piped up again, “You can put them in the fridge, no one really uses it right now.  I mean, I’m sure we will now that there’s something in there,” he awkwardly laughed. The clumsy boy smiled in acknowledgement.

“Well…” the other new boy suddenly interjected, “I think we should start with introducing ourselves first, before that.”  The clumsy boy’s almondlike eyes suddenly shot open in realization, laughing nervously at his own forgetfulness as he failed to conceal the blush on his cheeks.

The other boy spoke, with a tone so flat as to almost silence at the corners of each word, “My name is Choi Minki.  The director already told me I’ll be the youngest one here,” he continued softly, peppering his speech with flat chuckles, “So I hope you guys can look after me well.  I’m a vocalist, like you guys,” he motioned towards Dongho and Aaron, “Let’s have fun practicing together.” He grinned at them sheepishly. Dongho pointed back at him in foggy recognition.  “We met before,” Dongho said, “Happy Pledis album. We recorded together.” Minki grinned and nodded in acknowledgment. Jonghyun stared off quizzically. He recorded for that too, so why didn’t he remember?  Dongho looked over. “You were sick, so you recorded the next day,” he replied, as if he were reading the smaller boy’s mind. Jonghyun remembered. He sighed a little, as he had been hoping to actually make friends with someone who hadn’t already gotten a head start bonding with the others.

“Ah!  I guess it’s my turn?  I guess so right?” The clumsy one chuckled while grasping the handle of his suitcase.  Jonghyun turned to look at him.

“My name is Hwang Minhyun!  My birthday is in August of 1995, so please tell me who is older and younger than me!  I’ve asked the director about you guys a little but she suggested I learn from you guys directly.  I hope...I hope we can all be friends!” He cheerfully smiled, his nose wrinkling at the corners. His infectious smile reached towards Jonghyun almost instantaneously, and he felt the corners of his mouth curling against the tone of coolness established by the others in the room.  Friends. It’s the first time he heard any of the trainees use that word. Swallowing his bashfulness, he cleared his throat in response.

“Hwang Minhyun?” he spoke, his words stilted as he fronted indifference in a shy attempt to conceal the infectiousness of the new boy’s enthusiasm, “Hwang Minhyun…”

Minhyun’s eyes lifted to meet his.  Jonghyun met his gaze.

_The feeling before..._

Jonghyun wasn’t sure if this feeling was something he would need to seal away at some point.  

But in some part of his mind, as if fighting against the monotony of the unremarkable trainee life he had experienced thus far, he wanted to reach out and grasp something he thought could be there.  

_For now, anyway._

“...I’m a bit older than you, it seems,” he smiled.  “I’m Kim Jonghyun and I would be your hyung by only a few months.  Dongho was equally unlucky so don’t worry. Let me help you with the kitchen?”  He started over to a beaming Minhyun who was eagerly waiting for him.

\--

Jonghyun lay in bed that night, his normally spry teenage body a little more tired than he had been in days past.  A knowing and unwelcome fragrance danced constantly at his nose.

He impulsively sniffed the palm of his hand.  

The smell of baby powder had fruitlessly rushed to greet him but met defeat to the sinister pungence of kimchi juice.  Jonghyun sighed. After helping to clean out the kimchi that bubbled over ferociously into Minhyun’s luggage, he had still washed his hands several hands but the smell remained.  He smiled to himself in bed in dismissal. It wasn’t like he hadn’t smelled kimchi before anyway, and somehow he didn’t quite mind the temporary annoyance.

Instead, his thoughts moved back to Minhyun.  He glanced at the wall, the same wall he envisioned that faced the slightly clumsy but seemingly endlessly cheerful boy in the other room, settling into his new bed.  

_Should I check to see how he’s settling in?_

His small mouth tucked a cynical smile into its corners.

_Don’t even think about it._

The earnest thoughts disintegrated upon their banishing.  The quietest boy in the house until now, Jonghyun had of course wanted to make friends with the others, desperately, and yet to his shy and cynical heart it still seemed like nothing would change.  Nothing, unless Minhyun’s earnest positivity would finally manage to awaken in the others something Jonghyun had never quite managed to reach.

_Hwang Minhyun,_ he bemused, _are you sure you know what you’re doing?_  He imagined a cartoonish imminent future as it fluttered passively past his eyes like a sitcom, with Minhyun as the group mother, fretting splendidly over the heads of the other four as they tucked lovingly under his wing.

Jonghyun laughed and physically turned away from the ridiculousness of his own fantasy, his eyes catching the image of Dongho’s sleeping back, a stoic reminder of the way it’s been from the beginning to now.

  
_Minhyun has a lot to learn about us._  

Comforted by his resolution, his eyelids dropped to their feet.  His guard slipped under the weight of the day into exhaustion as he allowed thoughts to flood his mind.

_But still…_

His breath grew more and more still as he followed the strands of his thoughts unfurling from his jittery mind.

_...I’m curious about you.  Hwang Minhyun… even if no one wants to be friends with you...I want to try._

As his mind relaxed, a pressure placed itself on his back, as if hands were pressing his consciousness down.  Jonghyun surrended to the feeling as he felt his surroundings fade away in their sensation. A low static crackled in his ears, a sound he had not quite fully heard until it deceptively crept under the guise of sleep.

_Hwang Minhyun…_

He felt his body fall through an invisible dimension of the bed, as if he were being pushed by an invisible force towards the center of the Earth.

_Hwang Minhyun._

The warm fuzz of the static, which now rushed with the breathy roar of ocean waves, bathed his mental functions.  The name rolled over and over in his head, scattering about in fragments as if stray electrons bursting on contact.  The voice in his head consistently grew more and more distorted, as if the voice were filling every corner of the room.  

As it raced past his conscious realization, he could hear the name now echoing as if it were ricocheting off the walls of space.  His mind scrambled to make sense of the seeming arrest of his mind by this strange force that grasped him at the throat, pinning him with the force of dimension to his position in the bed.

The clothes on his body he always slept in without issue suddenly itched at his wiry frame.  The stiff and cheap fabric hugged him terribly, as if he was harnessed. The sensation of his body being pushed through a place beyond his mind stilled as rapidly as it had come, as Jonghyun lie frozen in trance at what he now saw before him.

_Where am I?_

“Hwang Minhyun!”  The garbled sound screeched from depths Jonghyun had faintly realized were previously unreached.  He instinctively looked below, his gaze falling about rapidly as if it were attatched to an unhinged camera.  There were thousands of people at his feet, peering more eyes than he could meet. He could feel the clattering vibrations of their nervous heartbeat as if it were a deafening baseline pulsating through the floor beneath him.  This ocean of people curled upwards into a wave, no less populated at the top than at his side.

_A stage?_

His small feet toed the edge as if it were a precipice crumbling beneath him.  Sensing his surroundings, he could feel the presence of strangers, and yet, eerily, they didn’t feel like strangers at all.  Jonghyun screamed searing commands to his functionless body to yell out, speak to someone, but his body disobeyed his every desire like he was standing in a scene from a video tape.  The voice in his throat yelled with a defeaning roar and the voice remained trapped in his mind as if in a cage, his physical mouth remaining tightly closed. His brain ushered a kick to his legs as he attempted to flail about, but his eyes widened in panic as he glaced down at his still feet.  The sensation of the crowd erupting in cheers called his eyes forward, fixed as if steel.

“Hwang Minhyun!”

_Hwang Minhyun..._

Jonghyun turned to see the figure of a boy, now slightly different than he had somehow anticipated, his nearly weightless dark hair bending to the velocity of him running from the podium where Jonghyun stood.  As Jonghyun possessed the body in which he lay trapped, his heart involuntarily filled with feelings that were not quite his own. And yet, they were.

_Look back._

_Don’t forget me._

Jonghyun’s eyes bolted open into the darkness.

The returning familiarity of the stagnant air in the small room greeted him in its crisp silence.  He widened his eyes on instinct as the black colored air bathed the visions of lights from his eyes.  After an eternal few seconds, his breath, no longer hitched in fear, exasperatedly dragged from his throat.  As if to test his command of bodily function, he lifted his arm shyly from the blanket, holding it still for a minute while sensations of foolishness danced at the corner of his mind.  

_Safe._

He jerked upright from the unforgiving mattress with adrenaline rushing throughout, his limbs scrambling as he felt around frantically for his phone in the dead of the night, retrieving it from the shelf and hurriedly pressing the power button with his quivering hands.

The familiar glow of the phone’s broken screen, prismatic with fractures lit up the room.

2011, November 16th.

Jonghyun exhaled.  Of course, traveling in time is impossible.  

_Am I going crazy?_

He clutched his chest with his palm as if the answer were written on it.

_No..._

His mother had a preoccupation with watching daytime television.  They showed stories of people who had strange visions, most so outlandish that only those whose unremarkable life finds time for 11 am television would have such an understimulated imagination to believe such tales.  Still, Jonghyun privately believed in the gift of psychic vision.

Perhaps, somehow, he had just become one of those lucky people who receive it.

_Another way to make a living._

He smiled to himself at his own dumb humor.

_But still._

His eyes fell upon the wall his room shared with Aaron’s again, as the smile faded to a pensive expression.

_It’s strange..._

He closed his eyes as his mind raced, swirling around in vapors as he tried to rationalize what he had just seen.  It somehow felt like the future. But it also felt like the past.

_It felt like a forgotten memory...somehow..._

Jonghyun sighed, surrendering his racing thoughts once again.  

This time, he fell asleep.


	2. Chapter 2

2011, December 25th. 

“Hyung,”  Dongho called out softly into the quiet of the morning.  

Jonghyun remained uncharacteristically silent.

“Hey...” the brawnier of the two repeated as his eyebrows curled in concern, his words trailing in the silence.

“Hyung!” Dongho growled with an artificial aggression, whirling around to seek eye contact with the older boy, “What’s up with you?”  Jonghyun’s gaze somberly peeked out from the blankets, reaching obscurely to some unseen point. At Dongho’s questioning, his eyes broke their spell as he willed their tilting towards the boy now leering perplexed above him.  “Sorry,” he muttered. Dongho cast him a furtive, quizzical look, and Jonghyun sensed the danger of being probed was far too imminent to justify laying under the blankets for a moment more. He cleared his throat and rose from his bed.  

“It’s just so cold~” he winced in mock complaint.  Dongho chuckled, turning back towards the wardrobe and showing Jonghyun the usual display of his naked back.  “You’re going to have to take it up with the manager. You know he’s the one who sets the ondol temperature,” he replied.  The larger boy then glanced back at the younger boy, his mouth twisting into a smirk. “When we debut, we can probably set it ourselves.  This is the last winter of suffering, just remember that.” 

Jonghyun glanced up at him, his gaze finally clearing from its mental fog, and met Dongho’s nearly mischeivous grin with one of his own.

_ Debut. _

A month prior, both Minki and Minhyun had called the other three boys from their individual positions in bed to meet in the main room, where Minhyun sat cross legged on the plastic dining room chair in response to Minki’s proper and relaxed posture.

“We have something to tell you!” Minhyun gushed.  Minki himself even had indulged in a tiny smile as he motioned to quiet the other and pick up where the other left off.  “Our director seemed to forget that we’ve joined the regular group C chat room, or had us mislabeled in his contacts or something.  Anyway...we got a message in our old chat room today that was meant to go to all of us…” Minki inhaled and and turned to Minhyun, who was now gleefully biting back words, afraid to rush to the moment and ruin the speech Minki had planned.  Minki laughed to himself as he nodded his head towards the other. “Okay, you tell them. You look like you want it more than me.” The other three leaned in with pointed looks, as Minhyun had told them, his eyes nearly glistening with what could have been enthusiasm or tears.

“We’re...debuting!  Together, as C group...”

“We’re going to be the first boys to debut!”

A month had now passed since that moment, since Jonghyun finally saw that dream in the sky coming to his reach, a month to be peaceful with understanding that everything he had worked for this point would now come to fruition.  And yet, Jonghyun had tried every day since to pocket the ominous feeling he carried in his heart ever since that strange premonition he had the night the two new boys came to the house. 

Jonghyun fumbled in a daze for the entrance of the main room as he shuffled to the kitchen, preoccupied in his thoughts.

_ Breakfast. _

The morning after that strange night, he had awoken to the smell of food for the first time since moving into the house.  Stumbling into the kitchen as always, he immediately sensed that he would not be the first to wake in this house any longer.  “Oh! Good morning!” Minhyun cheerfully whispered as he turned around, suddenly catching him off guard. Jonghyun’s eyes had then wandered to the portable burner, somehow loaded with a can of gas Jonghyun had never seen before and was currently busy heating a cozy and cheap Daiso pot, the origins of which he also couldn’t be quite sure.  

“What’s that?” he said as he had motioned towards the stove.  Minhyun glanced at the burner, eyes widening as he immediately tried to calculate the time he had left it unattended.  “Ah! I heard that you and Dongho are dieting, from the director…” Jonghyun lowered his eyes. “Don’t be ashamed! It’s nothing to worry about.  It’s normal, you know! We’ll be idols after all! And this...this is breakfast for us. I thought it could be my treat today! I don’t know if anyone else can cook…”  Minhyun trailed off as his gaze searched to meet Jonghyun’s. Jonghyun bit his lip ever so slightly and brushed past the new boy, towards the cabinet where his usual mug and tea were placed.

“Sorry, I’m not hungry.”

He couldn’t bring himself then to even have the courage to visually check for Minhyun’s reaction as he had simply steeled is eyes forward.  After a second of silence, Minhyun stammered, his voice fluttering ever slightly, “Oh...okay! That’s fine, I’ll keep it in the fridge for you and you can just grab it whenever you want.  Sweet potato is good for you, and good for your diet you know!” 

Jonghyun’s eyes had guiltily shifted to the pot where five sweet potatoes lay in a metal steaming rack.  His heart singed with his own callousness. Freshly off kilter from that strange premonition, the images from which still rippling through his mind, his confidence betrayed him, grasping at the corners of his mouth with the urgent need for confession.

_ I had a dream.... _ he had wanted to say.

_ I don’t know if I can trust you. _

Jonghyun rolled the thoughts that piled at the corners of the mouth away with his pressing tongue. Exhaling to disperse the private tension he had gathered in the silence, Jonghyun shrugged off his own ridiculousness.

_ Not getting close wouldn’t hurt, no matter if the vision meant anything or not.  It’s the safest option. _

He reassured himself with this thought, for it was never like he became close to Aaron and Dongho when they came either.  As well, in fact, he hadn’t even seen Minki since his introduction the day prior. 

_ Perhaps it’s better this way, _ Jonghyun had wondered.

_ It’s better to just keep my distance. _

And so It had remained as so for all the days since then.  Minhyun had never mentioned it again.

Today as well, Jonghyun calmly approached the kitchen.  Like it was every day since Minhyun had arrived, again a modest breakfast had been laid out onto the table for everyone to enjoy.  Fighting the growl of his stomach, whimpering in rebellion on this particular morning, he avoided the offering and marched towards the cabinet.

On this morning, in which the sound of the kettle whirring to life softly brought Jonghyun back to the present, the menu Minhyun chose for that day seemed to returned to its origins, as steamed sweet potatoes were laid out again in their bare modesty.  In the cabinet, he reached for his argyle mug and felt his knuckles brush against a foreign piece of ceramic. He curiously peered into the cabinet door.

A new mug, covered in rudimentary sketches of particularly cheerful apples with smiley faces etched into their surfaces, found its way right next to his.  Jonghyun sighed. He knew who the mug belonged to without asking. He quietly lifted the new mug from the cabinet and checked the bottom, subconsciously removing the Daiso price sticker on which it rested.  Underneath, cheerfully sketched English letters stamped to the base exclaimed at him: 

_ Happy! _

Footsteps behind him made their sounds more apparent as another shuffled into the room.

“Sorry, that’s mine.  I didn’t know if it was okay to put it with yours,” a timid voice said as it passively wafted through the silent morning air.  Jonghyun turned to meet Minhyun’s furtive glance. “It’s fine,” he replied, placing the mug on the countertop. He grabbed his usual cheap tea and tossed it into his own mug, his sense of manners angrily tugging at his collar.

_ Why can’t I just offer him tea like I do the others?  It wouldn’t hurt. _

If Jonghyun had wavered in his resolve, it wasn’t outwardly visible as he coolly placed the tea box back in the cupboard, leaving Minhyun’s cheerful mug empty as Minhyun waited courteously behind the other boy with pause until Jonghyun left the space open. Jonghyun did not dare himself to look in response to the eyes he felt peering shyly at the nape of his neck.  Instead, he shuffled back to his room, understanding that the guilt he felt hearing Minhyun rustling through the tea box as he exited the kitchen would be something new to brush off with each passing morning.

\--

“Let’s go everyone,”  Dongho called out, right as Jonghyun finished dealing with the last button on his puffy winter jacket.  He made his way for the front door, soldiering past the breakfast plate as they gathered together to leave the house that afternoon, traveling by the new black van their company freshly provided for them.  The sound of Aaron’s chitchatting to the others about the particulars of the previous day’s practice sessions warbled in and out of his ears as Jonghyun allowed himself a glance at what remained of the breakfast spread.  His stomach lunged forward at the sight of available food, and he averted his eyes in a futile attempt to quell its hunger. 

His eyes again lifted to the plate where one cold sweet potato lay, even its mediocrity calling out in seduction.  

_ This is morning warfare.   _

As the coup of hunger overturned his seemingly better judgments, he grimaced as he took the sweet potato off the plate and placed it into a plastic bag he found nearby.  He turned from the counter with his head tucked away from the others to avoid suspicion, and yet, as if his sense of timing had also switched alliances, immediately met the gaze of a shyly grinning Minhyun, whose eyes were nearly sparkling as he watched.  

_ Great.   _

He smiled towards the younger boy politely as he shoved the small token of defeat into the pocket of his winter coat as they filtered out the door of their unassuming villa apartment.

Jonghyun was the first to climb into the brand new car, as the whiff of professional air fresheners tickled his nose with their pleasantry.  He chose the seat in the back corner as the others shuffled in, with Minki taking the seat next to him. Jonghyun turned to smile at Minki but the youngest boy’s gaze constantly fell to his lap, his face continually bearing an expression of mild concern as the rest of the members shuffled into their places.  The manager they lived with visually checked their readiness, and nearly boarded the driver’s seat when Minki’s voice reached out.

“Uh, excuse me?  Actually, I don’t do too well sitting in the back of a van.  I get really carsick,” he quietly murmured, keeping his gaze to his lap.  

The members looked around at each other, and their manager, who otherwise operated nearly autonomous to them furrowed his brow in confusion.  Jonghyun’s eyes sardonically floated to the front of the car, the predictability of the situation proving almost too much to take for his ironic soul.

“Ah!”

“Let me switch with you!  You’re my only dongsaeng here, so isn’t it right to take care of you sometimes?”  Minhyun exclaimed, nearly tumbling out of the front passenger side of the car in an effort to unbuckle his seat belt.  Jonghyun sighed, his eyes tilting towards the sky. He then looked over to see Minki’s departure, nearly catching a tiny smile before it disappeared over Minki’s face.  Suddenly, Minki glanced over to Jonghyun as well, surprising the older boy and causing him to avert his eyes. 

_ What was that all about? _

“Thanks hyung,” Minki replied as he lifted his face to that of concern.  “Sorry to trouble everyone,” he continued with an empty tone that didn’t seem incredibly apologetic at all.  Jonghyun shifted in position towards the window as Minhyun lumbered into the seat next to his, beaming at him cheerfully despite his efforts to avoid any form of eye contact.  “Minki, you’re the one in control of the radio now!” Minhyun exclaimed. 

“I would prefer silence, if you don’t mind.  Some of us would like a little more sleep,” Dongho interjected.  And so they set off in silence. It wasn’t long before nearly all of the boys managed to find a corner to nod off.

Unfortunately, Jonghyun could never sleep in cars.  

He hadn’t been sleeping that well in the comfort of his own bed, let alone the unnatural caging of a pleather car seat.  After an uncountable amount of time abiding his boredom by watching the passing of other cars, his eyes floated back over the interior of the van.  All of his fellow trainees seemed to be sleeping fairly peacefully. He glanced over at Minhyun, whose featherweight dark brown hair hung in strands over his face as his facial expression fell to a quite unflattering, open-mouthed one of deep sleep.  

Jonghyun smiled to himself.  

Minhyun seemed happy.

Jonghyun couldn’t quite understand how the other boy always seemed to adapt to every situation so well, never expressing his discomfort or letting any of the unsavory times stain the persistently cheerful expression on his face.

No matter how much Jonghyun resisted, Minhyun was always patient.

In fact, Minhyun seemed practically resilient to anything.  

Minhyun seemed so…

_ Interesting? _

_ Fascinating? _

Jonghyun’s brows curled as he searched for the right word in his mind, dancing coyly around some of the candidates in a concealed anxiousness.  He realized in fuzzy cogniscance that he had only just now seen the face of the other boy long enough to get a good glimpse, usually being keen to avert his eyes in avoidance.  Now, at moment he had somehow been expecting to come, the pitying thoughts inside him relinquished their time, time to finally look at the other boy without fear of being discovered.  

He had, since the very first day, noticed before the peculiar way the corners of his somehwat chubby nose seemed connected to the inner corner of his eyes as if by marionette strings, pulling at the corners as he wrinkled his eyes in one of those signature enthusiastic smiles.  He had also noticed, at some point, the way his lips always seemed to be curled at their corners as if they were a cat’s, always tucking into a sort of half-smile on even the most somber of his expressions. He also often noticed the way Minhyun grasped at the hem of his clothing out of habit, as if they could fly away in a strong breeze.  

Quietly observing now, losing track of the time as the rest of the car fell under the spell of sleep, he almost hadn’t noticed in the corner of his mind, a discerning inner voice reminding him of the fact that he had never felt the same desire to observe Aaron or Dongho in the same way.

His eyes averted as his cheeks suddenly flushed with embarrassment.

And yet, he could somehow feel as if he grew tired of resisting the sunlight of the other, finding his eyes travelling back in their desires to rest again at Minhyun’s sleep face, his mouth dropping slightly to inhale deeper and deeper breath.  In the crazed jumble of Jonghyun’s thoughts, he rapidly rationalized to himself that, any premonitions be damned, he had still been pretty unpleasant to someone he hardly even knew. 

Someone whose persistent warmth from within, both oblivious and incessant, finally began to melt the icy frost of winter.

The words flooded his mind faster than he could trap them.

_ I’m sorry.   _

He closed his eyes tenderly, letting his head rest against the back of the chair.  The thoughts he kept sealed away, always fodder for the private anxiety war he waged within himself, smeared itself as they diluted with indulgent curiosities towards this strange new person.  The resistant fear fell like melting ice as he sank deeper into the car seat.

_ I’m sorry... _

Jonghyun exhaled slowly as his body started to feel heavier and heavier, as if being pushed against some invisible barrier he somehow felt he needed to fall through.   _ I’m sorry _ , he repeated.  The words swirled in his head as if they were spritzes of fragrance, dancing around chaotically his mind as if they were searching for a place which they had once been sealed away before.

He melted into the warmth spiraling towards his body and the air, now as warm as a glowing sunset, caressing his skin with its radiance as if showering him with melted gold, seemingly erasing the unforgiving coldness of the winter’s day.

Or perhaps, the air had indeed changed.

“Hyung,” 

The sensation of grass collected as if shattered into fragments, scratching their way into Jonghyun’s palms.  His ears filled with a hushed static as the sound of his breathing began to disappear, as if the volume of the sounds around him had suddenly been replaced by the sounds of a scene playing like a video in his mind.

“I’m sorry,” he heard the voice of Minhyun whisper.

_ Minhyun? _

Minhyun’s head reached in shame for the space where Jonghyun’s neck met his shoulder, burying it and smearing a path of tears in the process.

“Hyung…” the voice choked through gargled sobs.

“I’m so sorry….”

Jonghyun jumped in surprise as his eyes flew open.

The view of the back Dongho’s slumbering head greeted him in plain response.  Jonghyun blinked. 

_ What just happened? _

“..Are you okay?” a voice whispered beside him.  Jonghyun turned. Minhyun was leaning against the other window, bundled up in his winter jacket.  His sleepy eyes looked over from his phone with a quizzical look on his face. 

“Are you?” he whispered back in urgency to the younger boy, who met his question with a blank look.

_ And were you over there this whole time? _

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Minhyun asked, his voice rising cartoonishly as his mouth parted in surprise.

Jonghyun looked outside.  

_ That’s right.  _

It was snowing, and nearly negative 20 degrees outside.  

_ Winter. _

_ But just now, it was spring. _

Jonghyun tried to shake off the feeling.  His mind raced far too rapidly for the dull recognition that he had been spoken to to set in, and so Minhyun beat him to break the silence again.

“I can’t sleep in cars.  I mean, not for a long time,” he continued.  Jonghyun struggled to pull his thoughts back to one place as they maniacally dispersed, sinking into the silence now overpowering the two boys who seemed to be certifiably awake.  Minhyun straightened up, wincing in pain at the sudden uncurling from the cramped position he lightly slept in. “Aaah~” he moaned, looking up at the other member with a shy grin. Jonghyun stared blankly in return.

_ Spring. _

_ Another vision? _

He turned down the opportunity to let Minhyun know about his recent psychic developments.  

“Hey, you know….” he instead quietly whispered to the younger boy, softening his eyes somewhat, “How have you been settling down at our place?”  Minhyun turned in poorly acted surprise. “Oh!....” he trailed off, shifting his gaze forward as the smile remained plastered on his face. “You know.. It’s been okay.”  Minhyun nodded as if approving his own response. Jonghyun lingered in his gaze as he let out a dazed grunt in the affirmative. 

Rattled in his ever-racing thoughts, he remembered the day Minhyun came into his life.  He remembered the hope he felt to finally meet someone who he could someday call a friend, and that curious fascination that desperately reached out to him, almost eager to convince him that this familiarity wasn’t an accident.  He studied with intrepidation the face that finally, meekly, began to bore the insecurity that must have indeed been hiding somewhere deep in his heart.

“I’m sorry.”

The words burst forth from Jonghyun’s mouth like flowers shooting into bloom.  Motioned by the whiplash of embarrasment, he turned away to face the window, feeling his cheeks burn.  

“I’m sorry… that we’re a little messy and everything, let us know if you need us to clear anythi-”

“It’s fine.  Don’t worry,” the smaller voice echoed in its whisper to the other side of the car.  Jonghyun kept his eyes towards the window.

Silence passed for what seemed like several minutes before Minhyun spoke again.

“I’m happy, you know.  Just a little worried...about the sweet potato you seem to be sitting against right now.”  

The quiet voice rocked with a thin veil of confidence, even a joke seeming somewhat pitiful in its shyness.  Still, Jonghyun’s eyes widened in realization. He couldn’t help himself. 

He burst into laughter.  

Looking back at Minhyun, who glanced at him in return with reserved somberness, Jonghyun’s laugh grew even louder.  Minhyun’s mouth began to tug at the corners as well. “Did you forget?” Minhyun replied with, this time with a little more confidence than before.  Jonghyun reached into his pocket, retrieving the sweet potato which had been crushed beyond recognition against the side of the door frame. “I’ll eat it!  It’s still good,” the older boy laughed out, gingerly prying the plastic away from the smashed vegetable pieces inside. Minhyun’s intrepidation melted into vaporous giggles that could not help but dance around the older boy’s throaty laughter, creating so much noise that they didn’t even notice had even rustled Minki awake a few minutes earlier.

\--

“This is our last winter of suffering,” Jonghyun chuckled as he repeated the words back to Dongho, whose brows were seemingly frozen in their furrowing as he hugged his jacket closer to his masculine frame, rocking back and forth in place with a pained expression creeping out from his deeply reddening nose.  Aaron smiled wryly in response to Jonghyun’s sarcastic grin. “It can’t be fake when we say we’re grateful now,” he chuckled in response. 

Today was the first time the trainees attended a camera test, as Jonghyun understood it to entail facing the studio lights and black mecha of equipment dotting the landscape like deer in the headlights.  They had been unquestionably following the demands of their director in order to transform their helplessness into something more palatable to the camera’s eye.

“But I don’t understand why we have to wait outside when it’s not our turn,” Dongho choked out.  “Ah! Whatever. I can’t do this,” he scoffed as he started off towards a shelter that didn’t exist, settling instead for leaning against a pole marking the edge of the parking lot adjacent to the too-small photography studio the company allotted them.  The door to the building suddenly opened as Minhyun tumbled out of the studio. “Choi Minki~” he called out in singsong. The smaller boy who had previously been immersed in watching videos on his phone glanced up upon being addressed. He grunted in the affirmative as he traded his position with Minhyun and headed inside.  Minhyun turned towards the rest of the boys who were huddled together in various forms of freezing at the end of the parking lot.

And yet, his eyes immediately met Jonghyun’s in particular.

_ He has a way of doing that, _ Jonghyun thought to himself.  

“How’d it go?” he asked his fellow trainee with an artificial indifference.  Minhyun shrugged playfully. “I guess we’re not supposed to be good at this yet!” he nonchalantly exclaimed, “It’s my first time seeing something like that in there!  Seems like nothing prepares you for the real thing, yeah?”

Jonghyun smiled back in reassurance.  He tried to push the strange dream he had in the car further from his mind as it pestered him for attention.  “Well, it’s over now. Welcome to the cold,” he grinned. Minhyun’s hands slipped into his jacket pockets, smiling as he stepped towards the other boys’ direction.

\-- 

“But honestly...Hwang Minhyun….” Dongho grunted, “What are you going to do when we debut?  Sometimes...you look like a dumpling,” he smirked. Aaron bit back his laughter as Minhyun stared in mock surprise.  “What do you mean? What’s that supposed to mean! I’m cool too, you know, so I must be handsome to somebody! How do you think I passed my audition anyway?” he replied, his tone tilting and falling with his indignation.  Dongho glanced between the other two boys, matching their grins. Minhyun looked to them, jokingly aghast. Jonghyun smirked and stepped towards the now cornered boy. 

The conversation they had at first started to pass the time had shifted from mundane small talk to musing over the upcoming standards they’d be expected to uphold once they debut.  While talk of debut always seemed to lift their spirits into something they seemed to all agree was their form of unison, Jonghyun had not failed to notice that, for the first time, it was remarkably easy to keep the conversation going between them, even laughing along the way.  Of course, he also had not failed to notice that it was Minhyun who relentlessly talked at them in confidence until the others had no choice but to indulge his presence.

Unfortunately for Minhyun, that confidence was had turned to light fodder for their entertainment, and they were now poking a little bit of fun at his expense.  Jonghyun smiled to himself, silently grateful for Minhyun’s enthusiasm but never failing to miss this kind of chance.

“Hwang Minhyun,” he spoke, “You know that we’re trying for a cool concept right?  So what are you doing, go for a gap concept or something by yourself?” Dongho roared in wheezing laughter as he shot Jonghyun an approving look.  Minhyun curtly exhaled in mock exasperation, and then a cunning smile curled from his mouth as he leered at Jonghyun in reply.

“What if I do hyung?  We’re already debuting together, you know.  You’ll be stuck with this gap concept, hyung, if you’re not careful!”  

Jonghyun smirked animatedly at Minhyun.  “They said we’re debuting together, but it doesn’t mean they’ve seen you yet,” he playfully quipped, “Help us out with your dumpling cheeks, or you might spill kimchi at some other dorm come next year.”  Minhyun scoffed as he stammered against the playful laughter of the other boys.

“I help!” He exclaimed.  “I can help you right now, hyung!  I could, for example, let you know that your shoe just came untied!”  Minhyun snapped his comeback against the chiding and playful groans of the other boys while Jonghyun cheeked his cringe, looking to his feet and noticing the laces which had indeed come undone with his steps. 

“Hwang Minhyun, do me a different favor,” Jonghyun nonchalantly bemused, “Just learn to fit our concept before we debut?  Learn to be cool.” 

“As cool as walking around with your shoes untied?” Minhyun giddily replied, laughing at his own retort.  

_ Lame… _ Jonghyun thought as he smiled to himself.   _ I can do better. _

“As cool as being less desperate to keep such an adorable breakfast out for me every morning.  If you really like me like that, you can just confess you know,” he sharply replied with a smile.  The boys chuckled as Jonghyun looked up at Minhyun with a mischeivous grin. But Minhyun hadn’t been chuckling with them anymore, looking down with a fallen expression as his eyes grazed the floor.

_ Shit.   _

Jonghyun scrambled to find anything to say that would correct his intentions but all he could muster was a pitied expression and a stammering grunt.  “That’s how I wanted to help...” Minhyun interrupted quietly. Jonghyun’s emotions rushed to the surface of his face as he took a well-timed turn from the younger boy.  

“I was just playing Minhyun-ah, don’t take it seriously..” Jonghyun softly mumbled as he bent away to the ground to correct his shoelaces.  It was the first time he addressed the younger boy by his first name alone, and bashful heat flushed his cheeks.

“Just playing...hm?”  Minhyun trailed off, his voice tilting unnaturally upwards as he clamored around behind Jonghyun’s back.  Jonghyun pocketed his embarrassment for now, stammering in response as he whirled around, his voice full of genuine concern, “Hey, I’m sorry, I just-”

He was silenced by the small impact of something to the chest, followed by the sensation of ice water seeping through a small spot in his shirt.  He glanced down to see a small hand packed ball of snow crumbling at his feet.

He looked back at Minhyun, who had flipped the switch on his emotions and was now grinning from ear to ear, pointing at the older boy as if to belittle him further.  He even noticed the alliance of the other boys had shifted too as they bit back giggles and unsympathetic looks.

“Really..?” he flatly bemused.

Minhyun broke into near cackles as Jonghyun scrambled to display an expression besides the dumbstruckness of just being small-scale humiliated by a flying snowball.  

He had never seen Minhyun like this before.  The Minhyun who bumbled into the dormitory a little over a month prior with a happy apple mug, desperately pleading for friendship from the very first day, seemed to melt away like a facade.  Perhaps, it really was melting away. Perhaps Jonghyun managed to cross the doorway and now found himself in the true home of Minhyun’s persona, something he had foolishly not even realized was there to discover.  Without admitting anything to himself, the deeper parts of Jonghyun’s heart quietly accepted that he, perhaps, managed to finally bond with someone who happened to share with him the same unremarkable life and unreachable dream.

“Play safe, guys.  Jonghyun would be in a bit of trouble if he damaged our company’s clothes,”  Aaron lightly admonished as he leaned against the wall with an attentive grin, his boredom evaporating by the raising stakes.  Minhyun’s eyes squared with Jonghyun’s.

“Then I guess that sounds like Jonghyun has a problem,” Minhyun announced.

Jonghyun tilted his head in assertive response, ignoring the tiniest twitch of his heart beat.  

“What’s wrong, Hyung?  Want revenge?” Minhyun smirked as his voiced lowered into a husky taunt.  Jonghyun cocked his eyebrows in response. He couldn’t help but be somewhat surprised by this confident, mischeivousness side Minhyun hadn’t revealed of himself yet.

“Then..”

Minhyun broke into a run up the block, his footprints peppering the impacted snow.  Jonghyun watched curiously, as a sudden flush of happy feeling he couldn’t quite identify began to rise up from his chest.

“You’re gonna have to come get me!”

Jonghyun couldn’t help but laugh to himself at the nature in which their incessant boredom was being cured, by play-fighting like kids.  Minhyun, now at a distance, turned to face Jonghyun again, having grabbed a fresh handful of snow and busily crafting a new weapon between his hands.  Jonghyun was quick in retort, shoving a handful of snow from his feet and cupping it between his palms.

“You better stay there, Hwang Minhyun!” he taunted playfully as he broke into a furious pace with snow cupped in his fists.  

His breath tore against the icy shards of the winter air and broke upon his ears like radio static as he sprinted up the block where Minhyun now stood nonchalantly, taunting him with his relaxed posturing.  

“Come on then, hyung!” the younger boy laughed in response, raising his hands to taunt Jonghyun further.

Jonghyun chuckled again, now almost unheard against the static in his ears, the static which he nearly failed to notice was now roaring in volume.

_ Ah... _

He touched his shoulder to his ear in annoyance as the sound grew to a deafening.

“Hyung..” 

This time, Minhyun’s voice seemed to reach him in spirals, as if it were coming from several directions that had fragmented from a prism of sorts.  

Jonghyun’s vision, which had been focused on the shape of Minhyun ahead, slowly fell prey to the robbery by something he had failed to recognize before it suddenly grabbed to take its unforgiving hold.

_ Hyung!!!! _

Jonghyun suddenly stopped in his tracks.  Sneaking upon him, the sound of his own breath now resonated out of sync with the sound of another, the echo of which cascaded through his body like electric current.  His eyes froze forward, towards the small patch of sidewalk where the snow had been trodden away, leaving a deceptively opaque sheet of ice in its clearing.

The static that won victory over his consciousness flooded his body.  Shards of something that had once been shattered in a different space rained over his mind, frozen with the fuzz of subconsciousness, dissolving on contact and finding seeping like poison into areas of his memory that even Jonghyun himself hadn’t realized were sealed away, until this very moment.

_ No… _

The assaulting images that flashed as if they were but centimeters in front of his eyes tonelessly compelled him as if they were playing on a wall of screens.  The roaring in his ears of static and rushing winds drew him into a strange sort of trance.

_ A vision? _

Jonghyun stared at the street, the color draining from his face.  He shook his head in a futile effort to stop the intrusive visions from screaming over and over in his head.  The volume of an image seemed near quantifiable by his subconsciousness, and then turned up louder. The images before him flooded all of his receptors.

_ Is this a vision...of the future? _

“Hyung?”  Dongho called, his voice helplessly falling flat against the dimensional barrier.

Jonghyun turned his empty, possessed gaze to the others.  

“Hey, you okay?” Aaron asked, tilting his head to the side.  Jonghyun just dropped his gaze to the floor without a response.

_ No… _

Jonghyun surrendered to the demon that had taken over his sensory capabilities, as the now untied ribbon of reasoning finally feel heavy to its feet, defeated by the chaotic depth beneath it that was now soaring from his mind as if it were finally meeting its uncaging.

_ A memory. _

Jonghyun’s eyes lifted to meet Minhyun’s.

_ I remember. _

“You’re gonna let me win, huh?  You’re that easy!!” Minhyun taunted with a wide grin.

_ I remember it as if it happened before, long ago. _

Jonghyun straightened up, stoned by his thoughts.

_ And also… _

His eyes met the oblivious eyes of the boy on the other side, watching arbitrarily as his face broke into a wide smile.

_ It’s happening again.  Right now. _

“What’s wrong?  Scared?” Minhyun called out laughing.  

“Nah,” Jonghyun’s voice echoed in shards as it taunted back.  

Logically, Jonghyun had already worked out that he should stop.  And yet, it seemed as though his body disobeyed his command. Divorcing their function from his control, Jonghyun ran forth, taunting Minhyun with the handful of snow slowly cascading from his hands.  As Jonghyun laughed into the cold winter air, he then broke into a run across the icy pavement.

_ Don’t… _

His right foot slid out from under him.  

His left foot followed in the same direction.

He found himself abruptly, and eerily predictably, crashing to the icy floor, his left shoulder colliding on impact, and narrowly shielding his head from contact with the icy ground.

Jonghyun curled his body in shock as the pain hit his body all at once like a rain of shattered glass.

“Hyung!!!!” 

Minhyun screamed into the silence of the street.  Jonghyun’s eyes unfocused as his vision dotted towards the sky.  Pain electrocuted him on his entire left side. He could just barely feel the careful hand that placed itself on his arm, vaguely identifying it as Minhyun’s.  “Hyung…” the younger boy breathlessly choked in panic. Grunts of pain were all Jonghyun could muster in response. Minhyun hoisted the older boy onto his knee, and peered into his eyes with embarrassed tears of panic threatening to fall from their threshold.  “Hyung..” he sheepishly called again.

Jonghyun’s eyes met Minhyun’s, so close now that he could see the particular flecks of brown that spun out from the younger one’s now widening pupils, twisted to distortion by his scattered emotions.  He studied this foreign expression of panic as it blanketed Minhyun’s face like a sheet. Minhyun’s voice unfurled into an unintelligellable grunt of panic, and his eyes fluttered closed to trap the welling tears from exposing his embarrassing sincerity.  The rarely utilized strength of his arms awoke from their dormance, heeding the urgency of Minhyun’s calling. 

With all of his strength, the younger boy pulled the older one fully into his arms.  And then, letting go of the last of his panicked energy, he let his body collapse over Jonghyun’s like a protective shell, pressing his chest into the other’s back in embrace.

Jonghyun froze in silence.  The last of his tattered exhalation faded into the stillness of the air.

_ Don’t…  _

A possessed voice rang inside the quiet of his mind, as if screaming a signature upon the departure of its being.  Otherwise, silence befell them. He softly leaned into Minhyun’s warm embrace, laying his eyelids to close at their feet.  

Quietly, he surrendered to hear what this voice inside had been repeating.

_ Don’t ever lose this moment. _

It was as if the voice inside was coming from a part of himself beyond what he knew, lying in wait somewhere he had yet to ever discover, speaking to him from a place that was not here.

And yet, somehow, Jonghyun understood that the voice inside had indeed been his own.

\--

2011, December 27.

Jonghyun awoke to the lazy, neutral glow of afternoon seeping through the window.  His shoulder still throbbed complacently with the pain of the fall a few days prior.  He at least remained thankful that the fall wasn’t serious, although he certainly heard more than his ear’s share from the other boys chastising him that it could have very well been.  He made futile attempts to roll over to his side, quizzically wondering where he might have placed his phone before nodding off in the afternoon on a day when he was still banned from participating in the group dance practice.

His fingers found the welcoming presence of electronics as he reached towards the shelf nearby, fingertips pushing the edge of his phone to just enough of a tilt to cause it to cascade off the shelf, ricocheting off the desk below and landing square in the center of the bedroom, beyond his arm’s reach.

_ Great. _

Jonghyun winced at his misfortune, logistically scrambling to prepare for a herculean attempt to hoist himself up, when he suddenly heard the door creak open.  He turned in surprise to greet Minki’s face in the doorway.

“You up?” the youngest boy flatly spoke as he entered, with his characteristically quiet voice.

Jonghyun relaxed back into the pillow.  “What are you doing home?” he asked quizzically.  Minki smiled in ambiguous response. 

“I’m done with practice for today and I thought you might need some checking on.  Turns out you did, unless you feel like getting out of bed to come get your own cell phone,” he replied.  He then coolly reached for the phone, inspecting the damage to the already shattered front screen with an expressionless face.  Minki then turned to Jonghyun with the ambivalence of a doctor towards his patient.

“No further damage than what was already done,” he solidly determined.  “You should probably consider getting a new phone, though.”

Jonghyun smiled politely.  “It’s on my long list,” he somewhat too wryly replied.  His family wasn’t that well-off with money, and his parents didn’t need to be troubled by his own accidents. 

Minki turned his generally expressionless face towards the bed.  A thought seemed to almost sparkle in the light of his eyes, something even Jonghyun could notice in its effervescence.

Admittedly, Jonghyun hadn’t really grown closer to Minki since he moved into the dorm.   _ Minki seems to really value his alone time, _ he always told himself.  He hadn’t let the strangely unsettled feeling he always got around the youngest boy become a conscious factor yet, as if plucking this thought from the soil of his mind would pull up the roots on which this feeling grew.

Roots that, to Jonghyun, probably stayed best as they were, hidden away.

“Can I sit for a second?”  Minki nearly whispered as he turned to Jonghyun, his eyes peering with intensity Jonghyun had until now thought impossible for the youngest boy in the house.  Jonghyun curiously grunted in response as Minki gingerly took a seat on the side of he bed, laying his hands to rest properly in his lap. He remained silent for a minute that felt like several to Jonghyun before inhaling to quietly speak.

“I live my life like an act,”  Minki spoke nonchalantly, with his lidded eyes scanning his knees.  As the words faded into the silence, he looked to the older boy searchingly, but Jonghyun just looked back in confoundedness.  Minki returned his gaze to the south and continued without further explanation.

“I do...It’s really an act.  I live my life through what people expect of me.  I think that, because of that, people think I don’t know who I am.  But I do,” Minki continued with his eyes rushing to meet Jonghyun’s with urgency, “I’ve always known who I am.  Because this is the way I am.”

Minki stared forth, signaling the end of his antidote and bearing a facial expression of simple anticipation, as if he hadn’t just told Jonghyun something completely befuddling and absent of all forms of context.

Jonghyun met Minki’s gaze in confusion.

“Huh?” he replied, feeling somehow the foolish one.

Minki signed, almost sarcastically, turning his eyes to the wall across the room.

“You know…” he probed into the invisible solidity of the atmosphere, his voice now feeling for the limits of what could be said between acquantainces.

“Don’t you wish it was Minhyun who came home today,...instead of me?” Minki asked, tucking the emotions implicated in the question into the corners of his mouth. 

Jonghyun unhinged on impact.   His heartbeat skipped as his voice rushed to the trap in his throat.

“Um, what??” he managed to choke out, tilting his head to conceal the reactionary flush of his cheeks the implications of that question gave him.

Minki repeated himself blankly. 

“Do you wish it was Minhyun who was sitting here right now?”  

Jonghyun stared in wide-eyed confusion towards the maknae of the team.

“What are you talking about???” he asked with perplexity in his voice so thick it seemed to frost every word.  Minki turned to face Jonghyun, his eyes soldiering forth in a near perfect calmness to meet Jonghyun’s as they finally locked eyes.

“I see it, you know…”

“I see the way you look at him.  I know what you feel.”

Jonghyun fell in the silence as if it were the abyss.

The words lingered in the silence, indignant in their victory and joyously parading through the air such a humiliating notion, one Jonghyun had kept willfully tucked away in his heart.  

Choi Minki was someone he still barely knew, and yet this person had just nonchalantly reached out to the most precious portions of Jonghyun’s heart, sinisterly revealing something that wasn’t his right to reveal.

Something Jonghyun had kept sealed away to protect himself, if not, as well, the thought itself.

And now, everything was unravelling before his helpless eyes.

“I don’t want to fight with you,” Minki continued, “I want us to understand each other,” he airily laughed.  “I’m not really the type that spends all of my time alone, really, despite what you think,” he mused as if he were uncovering a deep truth.  “I spend all my time alone, because I haven’t found someone I can be myself with, you know. With you, I thought I might be able to be honest.  But I don’t know if you can be honest with me too,” he cryptically mused. 

Jonghyun lay with the weight of Minki’s words upon him as if they were pinning him to mattress.  

A feeling welled up in his throat.

Anger.

Anger that had no reasoning, no control, stung the insides of his cheeks as if it were hoisting itself up with shrapnels.  The sting travelled through his veins to his eyes where they gleefully waited to betray him with their eager display of embarrassed tears.

Jonghyun inhaled.

“Why...” he replied as his face flushed in betrayal.  “Look…..I don’t know what you’re implying, but I don’t feel anything different about Minhyun than I do any of the rest of you.”  His eyes raced as anger reached hold of his voice.

“Anyway, why did you come in here to tell me something that doesn’t make any sense to me, and expect me to understand that your own personal problems give you a right to pass your incorrect judgments onto me?”  Jonghyun continued rather heatedly, getting flustered despite himself. 

Minki stared back emptily in response.

Jonghyun rambled on despite himself, as if words could erase the memories of exposure, “I don’t know what your problems are and I don’t care, but figure it out yourself.  All I care about is debuting. We don’t have to be friends. That goes for everyone else too. You’re the youngest here, you know, so learn where you stand, okay?” Jonghyun continued despite his intellectual resistance.

“Don’t think you understand me.  Please. You don’t know anything about me,” he closed as he sneered with a nastiness that seemed almost possessed, his usual character snapping in its fragility.  He inhaled in a breath that matched Minki’s, his mind racing to somehow assess the damage he had just inflicted, the guilty thoughts dissolving upon touch.

Minki spoke first, his eyes falling to a close over a facial expression that failed to mask his disappointment.

“I guess I don’t,” he solemnly offered in response.

“But I thought you might be like me.”  

Jonghyun met his eyes, but Minki offered no further explanation as he silently excused himself from the room.

Jonghyun lay still, his pitiful cell phone laying on his chest.  He watched it rise and sink with his breath for several minutes of silence.

In the solitude of his bedroom, the mask of the facade he had proudly upheld, and that he truly believed to this point had always worked to conceal the darkest secrets in his heart, fell to its shreds as his cheeks burned with the shame of considering such implications.

Something that had been sealed away from him had been now released, creating a swirl of danger in what was once the safety of home, a danger that sensuously caressed the walls, joyously parading in the assurance that it will eventually reveal itself after releasing the fetters of shame in which Jonghyun had left it enveloped all this time.  And somewhere in this now uncontrollable feeling, the memories of another place beyond their existence had been tucked away, too. Memories Jonghyun tried to understand, but couldn’t free from the modest trappings of his own rationale.

His eyes fluttered closed.  His breathing stilled, as he left his guilty thoughts to flee as his conscience descended to lawlessness.  He rested indignant to the fear newly anchored in his heart, seeping like a poison into its secret depths. 

Weakness overcame him.

_ Sorry...Minki, _ he thought to himself.

_ I’m not like you. _

\--

2011, December 29th.

Jonghyun thumbed through the tabs of his phone as he propped his short body onto the side of the bed, tilting the screen artfully away from Dongho’s gaze in modest shame.

_ How to Channel Your Psychic Energy _

He bit back his embarrassment.  The shoddy website on which the article grasped at his deepest delusions sandwiched this information between alien encounter stories and a hopeful, elaborate argument of government conspiracy to silence citizens with supernatural ability as if all three were just as commonplace or likely.

_ This is ridiculous. _

_ But here goes. _

“Hey,” Dongho called.

Jonghyun threw his phone under the blanket with the speed of muscle memory.

“Don’t you think it’s hurting more than helping?” the buffer of the two mused.

“Huh?”  Jonghyun replied, flustered.

“Baek..ho???  I mean look at me,” he exclaimed while slapping his ever-expanding chest like an indignant animal, “It’s already like this.  Come on,” he grumbled, “I’m gonna scare people.” Jonghyun chuckled in response.

“It kind of suits you,” he smirked.

Dongho stared back in disbelief.

“Wanna trade for mine?” he casually groaned as he slid his back against the wall.  Dongho chuckled.

“At least yours doesn’t really make sense, you know?”  Jonghyun scoffed in response, “Since when is that a good thing?”

“Look at me!  Everyone will know why I’m called that!”  the younger boy exclaimed, exasperated. Jonghyun laughed in response, drawing even an amused scoff from Dongho.  

“Ah well...whatever...let’s get some sleep then.  At least we’re debuting,” Dongho trailed off as he lumbered into bed.

Jonghyun faced upwards to the ceiling from the bed.

“Our name, NU’EST….” he uttered quietly.

“Mm,” Dongho replied, seemingly already on his way to sleep.  

_ How can he fall asleep so fast?   _ Jonghyun wondered.   _ Perhaps I’d sleep as easily too if it weren’t for…  _

He let his thoughts trail away.  

_ Never mind.   _

The buzz of his phone called him away from his scattering thoughts.

“Jonghyun-hyung.”

Jonghyun squinted at the fractal light of the broken screen, managing to make out that it was Minhyun who sent him a message from the room over.

“Hyung!”

“JR~”

Texts from Minhyun arrived at a rapidfire pace.

“Don’t tell me you’re asleep yet!”

Jonghyun smiled quietly to himself.  

“Nah,” he thumbed in response.

“Come to the sun room then.”

Jonghyun swallowed nervously.  He couldn’t help but be accutely aware of the time Minhyun spent with Minki now, as the two had managed to grow somewhat closer than Jonghyun would like in the past few days.  It had been especially so since he had been left reeling from that strange conversation he had shared with Minki before. It was only his paper thin trust in Minki that he wouldn’t willingly shatter their dream together over such an outrageous accusation that kept him sane enough to resist it occupying every waking second of his mind.

Jonghyun shuffled out of bed and towards the sun room.  He could barely make out the figure of Minhyun against the dark of the night.

“Hey,” he mused, sliding open the door to greet the younger boy.  Minhyun’s face turned to greet him, but unlike normal, it now seemed marked by anxiety.  Jonghyun subconsciously mimicked the expression as he crunched his brows in concern.

“What’s up?”

Minhyun fell silent in response.  Jonghyun inched closer. “You okay?” he lowered his voice into near inaudibility.

“I’m worried,” Minhyun uncharacteristally whispered flatly, piercing holes into the ground with his gaze.

Jonghyun’s look turned to sympathy as his voice surrendered, trapped in the top of his throat as his mind desperately tried to wrangle with his selfish impulse to withhold his emotions, pocketing fear of provoking Minki’s suspicion any further and comforting the other with a soft voice.

“About what?” he wavered as he spoke.

“About everything..”  Minhyun trailed off, swallowing deeply.  Jonghyun searched for words in response but found his mind seeped in second-guessing what to say.

“I’m worried if this is right.”  Minhyun spoke as his eyes finally lifted shyly from their yielded position, ever so slightly.  Jonghyun found his own eyes falling in recognition of the other’s.

“Are we supposed to know?” Minhyun continued, “Hyung...I want to be happy too, like everyone else.  I’m worried about myself too, you know. What you guys said at the studio on Christmas day…”

Minhyun lowered his head, biting his words.

“I don’t belong with you guys.”

Jonghyun’s eyes snapped up to meet the crown of the other boy’s head in alarm.  

“Minhyun-ah,” Jonghyun hoarsley whispered in incredulation.  Jonghyun felt pummeled by the guilty confirmation that what they playfully chided Minhyun for on that day must have nestled itself deeply in the other one’s effervescent mind after all.  Then again, it was only Jonghyun who knew the insecurity Minhyun secretly kept precious inside his heart. 

That, if nothing else, was a responsibility he had meant to cherish.  

“Minhyun-ah…” he stared remorsefully, tilting his forward towards the other.

“Look...I’m sorry for what I said.”

Minhyun glanced back, his eyes nervously fleeting from meeting his eye contact.

“I didn’t mean it,” Jonghyun whispered in a huskily, raising his eyebrows in a pact of honesty.

_ Hwang Minhyun... _

Minhyun’s gaze fell to his feet.

_ The truth is…  _

“The others didn’t mean it, I’m sure...” Jonghyun continued in a tinny attempt at assurance.  Jonghyun attempted to divorce his emotion in futility as his thoughts radically surrendered to all of the secrets he had tried to nonchalantly ignore, the secrets now swirling in their taunt against the sides of his mouth.

_ If you didn’t belong here, with us…I wouldn’t have seen you at that time… _

“How do you know I’m right for this?” Minhyun winced.

_ Those visions... _

Jonghyun politely pushed his thoughts to the side as they bickered for possession of his voice.

“You are.  I just know.  I might have a feeling you’ll be the one who makes it to the top, if you keep working at it,” Jonghyun assured the younger boy with a wry smile.

_ Those memories...are a sign.  They must be. _

“Actually, I have a feeling that this is right.  Don’t ask me why...it’s just a feeling. We’re all reaching for the same thing here,” he continued.

_ They must be a sign. _

“I wouldn’t keep my hand, stretched up to the sky since the moment I had this dream, right alongside yours if I didn’t want to grasp this thing we’re reaching for with you.  And with all of us. This is the place I want to be. Right here with all of you. And so that’s the right place for me.”

_ A sign that I was meant to live this life. _

“As long as you want anything, that’s the right thing for you.  Always keep your hand stretched to the sky, until you’ve grasped what you wanted.  You’ll always be able to grasp what you want, if it was destined for you. That’s how you got here.  You have no idea how far it’ll take you. Neither do I...”

_ A sign that it’s destiny. _

“But I want to go there all together.  And so you, being here, being with us…” Jonghyun trailed off.  Minhyun looked upwards to meet his eyes. “It’s our destiny.” Jonghyun finished with a smile, pressing to keep the ambivalence in his voice as his own emotions rose to the calling of tears threatening now to fall from Minhyun’s eyes.  

Jonghyun’s hand found its way gingerly to the shoulder of the younger boy as he gave a reassuring pat.  Minhyun choked through an exhaustive sob and lowered his head to wipe his eyes with the collar hem of his shirt as Jonghyun’s mind melted into the burn of sympathy.

“I want to stay with you guys forever!” the crying boy suddenly exclaimed with such a childish enthusiasm that Jonghyun couldn’t help but giggle at.  “I mean that!” the younger one earnestly whispered, as if the calling the silence of the modest sun room as his witness to a promise that would provide the foundation for the future they would share together, a promise Minhyun sealed to Jonghyun’s heart with his seemingly childish tears.

Jonghyun smiled softly, with only the slightest gasp of doubt pulling at the nape of his neck.

_ Then why, Minhyun-ah? _

He pulled the younger boy into his arms, and in the privacy of the night, offered him the second genuine embrace between them thus far.  

His eyes gazed off into the evening as he offered his breath to the other in assurance, allowing, just this once, the tips of his fingers to quietly relent to the desire to caress the widening of the younger boy’s back.

_ Why did I watch you leave? _

\--

Jonghyun lie in bed as the pain in his shoulder screamed at him for attention.  How is it that a shoulder he smashed with full force into icy pavement and that should be occupying all of his thoughts, has to keep reminding him of its pain with periodic throbs?  Jonghyun’s mind raced onwards. 

He could have been in a great deal of trouble with the company.  He could have nearly lost his chance to debut. And yet, no matter what he felt he should be thinking about, his mind kept returning to Minhyun.  Somehow, here in this moment, he didn’t mind if Minhyun cost him everything he worked so hard for. 

As long as it didn’t cost him Minhyun as well.

He wondered if, for a moment, the future he saw in his so-called premonition, a memory from a time in the future, wasn’t something he could change.

_ Can I? _

He reached to touch his shoulder, absently soothing its rage.

_ Can I change something like destiny? _

The thought seemed familiar to him, as if he had spent a great deal of time pondering the question before.


	3. Chapter 3

2012, February 21st.

In the quiet hours of early morning, a quiet and unassuming black van roamed at an autonomous pace on the quiet highways that laced the unincorporated freeway towns of outer Gyeonggi-do.  Inside, Jonghyun’s meager body had fully surrendered to the grappling of exhaustion as he half-liddedly gazed out the window. Silently falling into the refuge of his thick winter jacket, his gaze lay unfocused into the darkness of early dusk; the seductive, blanketing warmth of the heat incessantly piping through the small plastic vents in the car glazing his mind with fog.  

For the first time in his life, he finally understood how one manages to fall asleep in a car.

Electric signs outside glared in aggression against the now competitive light of the brightening sky as forked streetlights smeared the skyscape, painting light upon the sky with their passing through the distortion of the glass windowpane.  The display nipped at his tired face, now plastered in thick cosmetics that had long overshot their function as they sank heavily into his skin. He inhaled deeply, then exhaled. In this exhaustive moment he felt oddly at ease, which was not so much odd in its nature as it was odd in its occurence.  At least, that’s how it seemed these days.

Jonghyun’s gaze shifted to his clothes, a bizarre selection in comparison to his normal wear.  He shifted his legs against the unforgiving seat of the car, further distorting the metallic reflection of his glittering stage outfit as he curled his brows in concern over whether or not the unbecoming outfit would be found suitable enough by the thousands who would soon see the music video they had just recorded for FACE, their debut single.  Remembering himself unprotected in front of the camera, lip-synching with a fervor he could only pray came across as natural, his face burned with embarrassment. Nonetheless, it was finally over.

He blinked slowly, ushering the thoughts that called his anxiety from its slumber to go in peace.  For now, at least, there seemed to be nothing to do but wait. 

There were instead other concerns pressing into the corners of his quiet mind, such as the peculiar visions he had suddenly been getting, lately appearing more and more frequently at a time when he should rather apply his senses to soldiering towards the immediate future.  And yet, the immediate future, looming ahead in its unyielding monstrosity, seemed to so honorably relent to the visions Jonghyun kept secret from the others, as if the two were somehow friendly companions on the pathway of time.

Jonghyun sighed as his mind wandered backwards to the vision he had seen last week.  He let the vision flood his senses again, floating across his closed lids as the van stayed its course.

The space around his gaze remained obscured in a shower of fragmented pixels hiding themselves from visibility.  In fact, the only part he could clearly see was the figure of a person in front of him, seemingly perched on a chair in some type of corner, in a place that felt somehow dangerous in its concealment, as if there were enemies listening through the walls.  The space around the person he saw dispersed upon his mind’s reaching, leaving just a strand of memory to ruminate. Still, Jonghyun felt that he knew that this person before him had, in many ways, experienced a considerable amount of pain in his fraction of life.  And even still, Jonghyun also knew that this person, at that time, had long since transformed from the experiences that had disfigured him, the absolution of his growth like that of a tree that had long ago taken root.

_ “You never really noticed,”  _ Jonghyun remembered, _ "that I was never as naive as you thought I was." _

He remembered the voice, enduring and blank, warbling through the prismatic fracture of the supernatural, coming to him through a vision of what seems like the future and yet, seemed also to be of the distant past.  

_ “Hyung.” _

_ “I’m no longer going to cry.  I’m not in pain anymore.” _

Jonghyun found his head rolling its weight towards the glass window pane of the car.  

He searched his memory for the face of the one who spoke such words, a voice he undeniably recognized, even as distorted as it was through the spirals of space, as he recalled the words spoken in his vision. 

_ It had to be… _

The familiar furrow of his brow now crept back to his face as his breath trailed from his nose, forgotten as his mind scattered in desperate seeking of the context that cruelly stayed hidden from him. 

_ It had to be Minhyun’s voice. _

The deceptive hopefulness in the words Minhyun had spoke somehow seemed like they would have deeply hurt, suffocating the receiver with unyielding pain that Jonghyun could nearly feel directly, searing his skin as if smoldering ash were pressing down onto him.

Jonghyun couldn’t really tell whether the pain was a response he had just assumed would follow the moment, or, perhaps, a piece of the memory that accidentally betrayed its promise to remain sealed.

Perhaps, indeed, there are memories that even the depths of the soul would rather not revisit.

His mind rolled in exhaustion.

_ Am I going crazy? _

Jonghyun asked himself the question he already could discern with all of his facilities.

_ Still…it doesn’t seem right to tell anyone about it right now.  Not just yet.  _

His eyes refocused to the present as he departed from the discomfort of the unknown, finding his gaze landed safely back into the interior of the warm car.

_ It could, after all, be nothing. _

Jonghyun shifted his lethargic eyes over to Minhyun, who lay pleasantly dreaming beside him in the next chair over.  

The dark eyeshadow that caked Minhyun’s lower lids just 24 hours before had now travelled lightly down the sides of his face as they gave up their duties.  He had seen a bit of Minhyun’s recording earlier, knowing better this time than to indulge freely in the other members’ chiding at his awkwardness in expressing charisma.  Jonghyun smiled to himself at Minhyun as he remembered that the generally chirpy younger boy had done slightly better, to his eyes, than expected at keeping their concept. He dutifully recalled the words of the Pledis director of trainees, whose wing they would soon depart from, along with the several producers and directors they would flock to, as the words of all of them chomped brutally at his ears.

_ NU’EST has an expectation to uphold.   _

_ We are the standard expectation Pledis will set as they prove their success at manufacturing male idols.  We’re expected to provide harsh competition for other Q2 groups debuting from other entertainment companies at the same time, a war in which many of the larger entertainment companies have raised their stakes enormously high.   _

_ The survival of Pledis in that war, it’s our responsibility… _

As if they were a mantra, he parroted back to himself each day the words he had been told the day they signed their contracts as a group, his childish pride bolstered by the sense of duty that they had entrusted upon him.

_ I’ve got this, _ Jonghyun thought as he exhaled with confidence, his mouth turning to a furtive smile as he glanced at the happily sleeping boy across from him. _  But you, Hwang Minhyun…  _

The dreaming, pillowy silence of the other greeted his thoughts in response.  Jonghyun tilted his head back as his gaze rested upon him. He had always found that seeing Minhyun somehow gave him a sense of everlasting calm, as if radiant peace was constantly flowing from within the other boy’s heart.  

Jonghyun reached his hand across to the sleeping boy, his rationale far too spent by now to worry about his intentions being misunderstood.  His fingers quietly found the jacketed palm of the younger boy, and then, as if acting on advice delivered from a fragment of his heart lost in another time, he softly curled his fingers around the other’s.    His eyes softly closed as his body succumbed to the coddling warmth of the car, his hand outstretched to Minhyun’s as his fingers clasped the others in tranquility. In the placidity of his mind, he quietly opened his heart’s desire towards the future, the miraclulous sprout of a seed of hope springing from the soil of dreams as it greeted the coming Spring.

It was a hope that he loved with a power so strong that he spent the majority of his youthful, unremarkable life protecting it dearly in the small of his heart.

_ God _ … 

Jonghyun quietly prayed among the stillness of the other members, lying as still as though they were angels.

_ God...please. _

_ Let this debut be a success. _

_ Let NU’EST be a success too. _

He released his wish to the early morning sky as his small, determined smile leaned against the resting of his closed eyes.  His mind, both weakened by the torment of overthinking and soothed by his prayer, softened to a quiet as Jonghyun fell asleep.

\--

2012, February 22nd.

“Kill me.” 

Jonghyun matter-of-factly declared his final command as it rattled throughout his suffering body, now lying rock still save the minimal effort required to address to the older boy peering and giggling over him.

“Fine,” Aaron replied dryly cracking a sly grin over Jonghyun’s slumped figure on the sofa as he turned to depart towards the kitchen.

“Nnnnn….hey...” Jonghyun groaned, “Youngmin-hyung...I mean, Aron...hey….” he called weakly from the couch.  Aaron simply chuckled as he walked away, ignoring the other’s feeble pleas for assistance. Jonghyun’s vision crackled as his eyes broke apart to search for the older boy who had valorously exited the room.  In the corner of the hallway, an ethereal cloud of platinum blonde had nearly escaped from his view.

“Choi Minki….” he croaked, pain pulsating from his head as if he were being beaten with small, invisible hammers.  Minki turned to face him inquisitively, his rapidly thinning frame practically feminine now in its stature and fragility.  

“Minki-yah.....tell hyung where the painkillers are,” Jonghyun groaned.

“They’re in the bathroom, next to our toothbrushes,” Minki replied, the tone of his voice ever so flat and yet unnaturally tilted to the upper register, a habit he had been suddenly adopting these days.  

“Yeah..so...” Jonghyun grunted huskily, his eyes peering at the younger one as they delivered their aggresively implied suggestion.  Minki’s eyes coolly met his gaze, his expression constant.

“So, hyung, you can just go get them yourself,” Minki curtly replied, his arms curling away from the older boy in apathetic refusal and his long blonde hair rustling slightly as he tilted his head in disinterst.  “Your head only hurts because you don’t sleep well anyway.” Jonghyun stared back vacantly at the succinct retort. Minki, as usual, wordlessly excused himself from the conversation, leaving Aaron chuckling as he re-entered the room, carefully thumbing the lid of a cup of instant ramyeon.  Jonghyun’s head sharply rose from it’s laying position in indignance to the seeming desertion of his housemates.

“Hyung,” he spoke with bewilderment, “What’s up with Minki?”

“He’s becoming Ren now...that’s what’s up,” Aaron replied, unceremoniously digging into his cup of noodles.  “Ren,” he repeated with a full mouth as noodles cascaded from his lips, now laughing robustly to Jonghyun’s further confusion.  Aaron exited again as Jonghyun’s brow tensed, tilting his throbbing head around to peer at the now empty space that greeted in return.

“Ah…whatever...” he huffed as he spoke to himself, stretching backwards in momentum to prop himself up.  “Mmmm~” he groaned playfully to himself as he stretched into a catlike position, pushing his fingers out in front of him as he shifted back onto his knees, stretching out over the sofa where had spent the better part of the day in a half-asleep state.

The smack of a small box landing on the end table behind him froze him in the middle of his posturing.  Jonghyun titled his head back towards the sound of the noise, seeing Minhyun standing over him grinning from ear to ear.  “Here!” he spoke, his bright voice mothering the other in its warm concern as he shifted back towards the kitchen, “Let me get you some water with those too, hyung.”  Jonghyun’s eyes followed in silence behind the other boy who was making his way over to the kitchen cabinet. Pulling down Jonghyun’s mug from the shelf, he smiled as he threw tentative glances at the now outstretched boy on the sofa, unfurling from his stretching position.

“Don’t get up, hyung!  It’s time for you to rest,” Minhyun called in a singsong tone as he filled the mug with water from the sink.  Jonghyun’s eyes followed him as he brought the mug back into the common room, beaming as the joy of taking caretaking drew itself apparent over his face.

“Thanks, Minhyun-ah…” Jonghyun spoke, his voice dragging in a low whisper.  He took the mug from the other boy and brought it to his lips, the metallic taste of tap water tickling unpleasantly at his tongue.  He felt Minhyun take a seat beside him at the couch, turn towards him, and rest his hands apprehensively at his knees. “Hyung…” he addressed Jonghyun as the older boy was busy fumbling the painkillers from his hand to his mouth.  

“Mmm?” Jonghyun murmered as he sipped them down, swishing the tap water’s unforgiving taste around the sides of his mouth.

“Hyung, you like to worry about us I know,” Minhyun spoke, his eyes being nearly forced from view as their lids were enthusiastically pushed upwards by the force of his beaming smile.  Jonghyun stared inquisitively, his head lowering with the weight of its pain.

“Hyung..” Minhyun continued, “It seems you worry so much, that you can’t sleep these days...right?” He continued in a cheerfully teasing tone.  Jonghyun nodded sheepishly in response. 

“Well...don’t be like that!  If our leader doesn’t get the sleep he needs, we don’t have a leader do we?” he finished as he playfully shook the other boy’s knee.  Jonghyun smiled slowly, as Minhyun’s exuberance always seemed to nip at the corners of his mouth. “Minhyun-ah..” he spoke in his signature rattling voice, “you better not worry either, about anything but getting ready for debut.”  He tilted his head towards the other in playful admonishment, widening his dark brown eyes as he peered at the other. Minhyun responded by stilling his hand upon Jonghyun’s knee, returning Jonghyun’s gaze with one of his own. Upon the resting touch of Minhyun’s hand, Jonghyun’s eyes broke their contact.  The unusual nature of the other’s touch embarrassingly provoked a sense of bashfulness arising in his throat.

“I know, hyung,” Minhyun replied, “but I think I know of something that can help us both.  Hmm?” Jonghyun turned to look at the other as neutrally as he could while pocketing an unexpected shyness, as his leg subconsciously shifted from the other’s grasp.  Minhyun seemed oblivious to the other’s feelings as he continued. “It might do you some good to get out of the house; use your energy so it doesn’t leave you up at night,” he exclaimed, “Even I want to go out lately too, you know!”  Jonghyun cocked his eyebrows skeptically upon hearing the suggestion.

“I don’t think we really have time for that kind of that thing, when we should be practicing now more than ever,” he airily interjected, his eyes darting a responsible look towards the smiling Minhyun, “But, even so, how does that help you anyway?”

Minhyun’s gaze turned towards the front as he pushed his upper lip upwards in a pensive expression.  “Hmmm….” he hummed as his eyes drifted upwards to his mind.

“Actually...there’s something I too need to get out my system.  I want to be exhausted, hyung…” he cryptically spoke as his eyes trailed the ceiling.  “That way...I can just debut. That way I can just focus everything I have on our team.  So...let’s go together, hyung!” He breahtily sighed, his eyes returning from his concealed thoughts as he lowered them onto Jonghyun’s face, “There’s a park by Han river, I used to go with the other boys from D group before I came here.  Have you been there too?”

Jonghyun shook his head, the curious expression remaining foolishly plastered on his face.

“How can you not know about it?  Hyung! Let’s go there tonight and play!” Minhyun exclaimed.  Jonghyun swallowed. Minhyun’s eyes darted over the room as he continued, “Let’s go tonight, just us, let’s just be regular teenagers for one night.  Don’t say no to me hyung! I won’t let you~” He hurriedly stood up from the sofa before Jonghyun could reply as he hurried towards his bedroom, leaving the older one to his scrambled thoughts on the couch.  Jonghyun’s eyes chased after him bewilderment as his head groaned in protest at arranging the scrambled thoughts laid before it. 

The suggestion admittedly tickled his ostensible heart, as the sight of Minhyun’s chocolate brown hair bouncing with his effervescent steps seemed even to shake off the restless thoughts that otherwise broadcasted at all hours in Jonghyun’s mind.

“Minhyun!” he snapped, stopping the boy in his tracks just seconds before he would disappear into the cavern of his bedroom.  Minhyun turned back towards him, his almond shaped eyes enlarged in surprise at the spontaneous boisterousness of Jonghyun’s voice.  

Jonghyun glared back, his eyes piercing through the air as he delivered his response.

“What time?”

\--

“Ah~!” 

Jonghyun gasped as he winced, pulling the folds of his jacket tight around his chest in an ineffective attempt to arrest the freezing air that pricked at every exposed crevice on his small body.  He squinted ahead, his eyes nearly failing the journey past his rapidly numbing nose, as he watched Minhyun entertain himself at the community basketball court. The younger boy’s tall, pale body flew upwards upwards as if it were a sprout shooting from the earth below, dunking a basketball into one of the park’s community hoops as remaining strangers around them filtered out for the evening.

“Minhyun-ah!  How long do you plan on playing there by yourself again???” he shouted towards the younger boy, his cheeks protesting against such movements as they ached with frost.  He wondered to himself how he had somehow managed to agree to a night time visit to the park without it crossing his mind that it was still the twilight of winter. Exhausting his physical facilities too early on, he had been instead spending the greater part of their outing watching Minhyun by himself as the cheerful boy lost track of time, indulging in such banal activities as placing a ball inside of a circular net for hours.

Minhyun stopped from his activity and turned in response to the calling of the now certifiably bored and frozen Jonghyun waiting on the side.  Now facing the older one, his cheeks were a glowing pink from the freshness of physical exertion as glistening sweat vaporized against the crisp February air.  “Why?” he laughed back, “In a hurry?” He reached besides him and retrieved the ball that had rolled arbitrarly besides him in its abandonment. “Come on, hyung!  You’re not getting tired are you?” Minhyun taunted, grinning to the shorter and comparatively unathletic boy as he stood impudently by himself at the end of the basketball court.  

“It’s getting a bit late now, yeah,” Jonghyun quipped caustically, “so we should probably head back you know.”  

Minhyun’s persistent smile glowed almost mockingly at him in response.  “Hmm,” he mused, his eyebrows furrowing in a cartoonish manner. “Nah. I’m not ready yet,” he then nonchalantly declared as he darted back towards the end of the court, dribbling the basketball back towards the net.

“Hey~” Jonghyun whined, his glare peppered with only semi-playful admonishment.  Minhyun seemingly ignored him as he physically thrust himself full throttle into his one man game, darting around the court as if he were a moth fluttering among the orange street lamps dotting the court.  

“Let’s stay out late tonight hyung!  Just you and me!” Minhyun laughed as he yelled out, the echo resonating against the sound of the basketball repeatedly hitting the concrete court floor.  Jonghyun’s eyes widened in response as Minhyun had, as usual, predictably ruffled the practicality of his thinking, posing a daring suggestion he was not often accustomed to considering.  

Minhyun glanced over at Jonghyun, once again letting the basketball fall to the floor in abandonment. “What do you think?” he mused, his cheerful head tilting to the side as sweat lightly shimmered from behind his fringe.

“We can’t do that,” Jonghyun replied, his words kicking back the frost in friendly but assertive disapproval.  Minhyun’s eyes met with his as the younger boy’s mouth contorted into a melodramatic pout, lowering his head and widening his eyes in an earnest attempt at compelling adorability that Jonghyun couldn’t help but be further flustered by.  “Come on~,” he whimpered, “I won’t let you say no to me, hyung!” He turned back towards the basketball as he made the motion to restart his activities as Jonghyun pursed his lips in growing annoyance at the other boy’s cheerful defiance. 

“Minhyun-ah,” he called out, his voice taking on an almost parental seriousness as his hands straightened into his jacket pockets.

“Let’s just go a bit later, hyung.  Just a bit!” The other boy called in response as he stopped and whirred around to face the other.  He slowly began to walk towards Jonghyun, his arms falling slack to their sides. “Hyung... please..” he continued, his face straightening to an unusual expression of imploring.  Jonghyun found his breath curiously hitching in his throat, sensing this departure from the norm as he searched for the reaction he should, his overwhelming sense of duty bickering with his spontanaeity in the running dialogue playing in his head.

Minhyun now stood in front of him, appearing abnormally tensed his position as he gazed at the other with intrepidation.  

“Let’s go now…” Jonghyun spoke, his voice concealing the waver in his resolve.  He relented an affirmative smile at the other, but Minhyun’s expression remained solemn for a lingering moment before finally twisting into an expression that Jonghyun had never quite seen grace his usually cherubic face.

“Fine!”

Minhyun’s spat his reply back at Jonghyun as the older one stepped back from the other, temporarily dumbstruck at seeing Minhyun express anger for the first time, “Go home if you want to then!  Go home and go to sleep!”

Jonghyun stared blankly ahead in response.  Minhyun’s crumpled face untensed slightly as he suddenly averted his gaze in whiplash remorse.

“I’m sorry...hyung…” he uttered, keeping his voice low and constant as his exhale.

Jonghyun peered ahead, his metaphorical fingers frozen in their position as they had apparently reached a button whose existence he had not been aware of before.  The thoughts that constantly jangled in his ears, for once, fell silent, as the surprise of angering Minhyun provoked a penance in him as it rose upwards in his chest.  He looked to the other boy, and smiled in assurance.

“Is that the best you got?  Minhyun-ah…” he smirked as his hand lifted towards the taller one’s shoulder, clasping it, “it’ll be impossible for you to ever truly hurt my feelings then, you know.”

“It’s alright hyung,” Minhyun replied, shifting away from Jonghyun’s grasp and stepping forward into the grass.  “Just…” he spoke as the sound trailed off, his eyes facing towards the river bank ahead as he left Jonghyun to contend with the silhouette of his back.  Jonghyun carefully stepped forwards to meet him, approaching the other as if to beg him back from his thoughts. Minhyun’s head fell as he turned back to face Jonghyun, his expression returning from the pensiveness beyond as he let a sincere smile escape from his lips.

“You know, thanks for coming to the park with me, that’s all,” Minhyun finished, his pitch meandering as it drifted into the sounds of late evening.  Minhyun’s eyes avoided their command from Jonghyun’s, whose gaze remained fixed as a reliable anxiousness bubbled in his throat. Instead, as if jerking in withdrawal from the concealed emotion behind his words, he rapidly shifted his body as he dropped to the ground, his back landing on the ground beneath the icy grass with an audible pat.  

Jonghyun stared at the younger boy with astonishment as the unrelenting pain of the cold nipped at his bare skin.

“Lay with me hyung,” Minhyun spoke.

Jonghyun held his stare towards the other as the words reached him.

“Lay with me,” he repeated, as he casually breathed into his words while his body relaxed against the bitingly cold ground.  Jonghyun stared hesitantly at the younger boy, pulling the hem of his jacket tighter as if its security were threatened. “It’s too cold for you to lay like that, Hwang Minhyun,” Jonghyun halfheartedly reprimanded, his voice growing ever softer,  “At least admit you’re going to catch a cold like this.”

“Hyung…” Minhyun replied, the tone of his voice reaching towards an uncharacteristic sobriety, “Just for now.” 

Minhyun’is eyes remained constant towards the stars as he lay sprawled on the ground, the icy grass caressing his pale skin with its whispers of cool melting water.  Jonghyun gazed towards the other. The expression on Minhyun’s face resolved to a peaceful calm as Minhyun rested among the grass, his body laying as delicately on the ground as if it had been placed by an angel’s hand.

_ Weightless. _

Minhyun had always seemed utterly weightless to Jonghyun at times, as if the softness of his slender body had been so precious through the years as to never encounter a single bludgeon of shame, a single ugly streak of pain or hurt allowing itself to grace his radiantly positive facial expression.  

Jonghyun kept his stare fixed onto the other’s face that now gazed longingly towards the sky, while finding his own body sliding down against its wishes towards the frosty ground, the unfostering grass crunching beneath his weight as he came to lay beside the other.

_ Minhyun-ah... _

“Stay with me for a while..” Minhyun nearly whispered, the usual childlike elation somehow filtering from his voice as if his cherished mind were suddenly falling prey to anxious thoughts it was never equipped to handle.  After a few minutes of silence between them, Minhyun’s eyes seemed to suddenly remember Jonghyun’s presence as they snapped to meet him. “Soon everything will be different, you know! Why rush now?” Minhyun asserted as he stared back, the cheerfully animated expression on his face just barely faltering.  Jonghyun found himself drawn to the other magnetically, as if the presence of one provided some sort of protection to the other, preserving them in this moment as they lay in the park.

“Because…” Jonghyun responded, freehanding an answer as he tried to mask his unhinged emotions, “Because...I don’t know.. It just feels like I have to be responsible, even if we don’t have to. That’s why,” Jonghyun spoke, earnesty bolstering the resolution in his voice.

“It’s not so bad, being irresponsible though…” Minhyun replied, “sometimes it’s like that too, right?  It’s okay to be irresponsible, Jonghyun-hyung! It’s okay at times when it’s not hurting anyone...”

“Minhyun-ah...” Jonghyun spoke, his flustered thoughts disobeying him in the wavering of his voice.  

“Hyung,” Minhyun called back, looking towards him.

“Sometimes it is...but Minhyun-ah...we sometimes have to give up being irresponsible too,” Jonghyun interjected, “We agreed to give that up when we all came together to go for this dream.  That’s how it’s like for me...that’s why we’re here. This opportunity we were given, it’s destiny for me and you. And for the other boys too.” Jonghyun looked to the other in anticipation, but found Minhyun instead stilled to silence as frosted clouds of his breath vaporized in the air, dancing between his face and the other’s, his gaze seeking an unknown space on the southern horizon as his expression glazed over with deep thought.

_ Minhyun-ah... _

“I know we can do it… We just have to reach forward…” Jonghyun continued, steelling in his words.  He had picked up along the way of his trainee’s life a dutious burden of ignoring his own fears, addressing the anxiety in his heart with an almost despotic sense of positivity.  He pressed down against the rebellious emotions rising in his throat as his eyes searched the younger, searching as if his face held the map to find the place where Jonghyun could reach the anxieities visibly troubling the other one’s mind.

“So...don’t lose sight of our goal now, Minhyun,” he urged, a fronted smile gracing his face as his left cheek endured its dip into the icy grass to face the other.  “Hey,” he continued, “just think about our parents anyway. It’ll be the last time we can see them before we become adults, so...don’t you look forward to next week when we can go home?” Jonghyun spoke with a canned cheerfulness, letting his hand rest on his own chest as his body grew accustomed to the temperature of the frozen ground beneath him.  

Minhyun let Jonghyun’s question hang in the silence of the air, his gaze only faltering as slightly as the breaths he took, casting their clouds into the winter night as he released them.

“If I said I was looking forward to it,” Minhyun replied, tilting his head towards the other boy as strands of hair fell like sand across his forehead, “I’d be lying, hyung...” 

Jonghyun’s eyes locked against Minhyun’s at the unexpected response, and yet the younger boy’s remained unfocused, exploratorily searching in his mind among his seemingly fragile thoughts.  At their almond tapered corners, taunting in their threats to escape, were tears that somehow carried with them more than the kind he had usually sported in childlike emotional overwhelm. Jonghyun’s heart pulled towards the other with an instinctive call as he drew silent, focusing on Minhyun completely as the breath in his throat grew as resonant in his chest as if it were the rushing ocean.

“Because when we come back to Seoul…” Minhyun continued, his voice falling belittled in its solemnness, “...who knows when we’ll be able to be like this again?”  Jonghyun took a small, sharp breath as he pondered what the other had asked him. The scattering thoughts that he reached for fled from his grasp. 

“Like how?” Jonghyun he carefully replied, his voice nearly cracking under its suppression.  Minhyun’s gaze trailed away as he lifted his head towards the night sky. 

“Like this.  Staring up at the sky...laying in the grass…” the younger responded with the hint of a melancholy smile tucked into the catlike corners of his mouth, “Just...not knowing, you know?”

_ Not knowing. _

Jonghyun’s mind raced beyond a twinge of envy that sprang from hearing those words.

_ Just...not knowing…. _

His gaze now too lay frozen, swallowed by the blanketing calm of the other boy, his eyes unclenching from their own anxious grip as he let nervous thoughts roll away with his exhalation.  He silently wished to himself that he, too, could be as relaxed in not knowing, like Minhyun seemed so content to be. His mind finally muted its ever-blaring thoughts as he breathed deep, clouds of exhalation swirling from his face like it were the white smoke of dragon’s breath.

_ Let me be like that too...just not knowing... _

He childishly imagined laying as if he were on a cloud, envisioning the ground disappearing underneath him, floating listleslly through an endless sky as the gravitational crush of anxiety slipped away.  As free falling worries grasped at his attention his breath remained constant, ushering them across the threshold in peace, upon which they vaporized into invisible swirls soaring upwards to the atmosphere of the earth.  And, for just a moment, Jonghyun almost felt as if the constant presence of his own vexation, the stains of his hidden, burdenous shame, began to unravel at its source, its power surrendered to the nothingness in which he now allowed his mind to be bathed.

_ Weightless. _

“Hyung,” Minhyun whispered, his voice so peaceful it embodied the tone of absolute silence, his voice radiating as if it were sun rays in the space between them.

“Hm?” 

“Let’s be quiet like this now,” he continued, wavering in his hushed tone as if he might awaken the dormancy of unspoken thoughts that lingered in the air surrounding them, “Let’s just listen to the feeling in our hearts.  It might be the last time they’re racing like this,” Minhyun said, his voice trailing as the concealment of his thoughts fluttered behind their harnesses as dancing silhouettes racing up towards the sky. Jonghyun’s mind vainly ached to know what the other was thinking as he let his eyelids fall to their closing.  His heart pulsated with tangible vibration in his chest, deeper and deeper now, as it pulled from each end of his self back towards its center, pulling back as if to keep his body from dispersing into a million tiny pieces.  _ Quiet, _ he voiced back silently among the stilling deep of his mind.

_ Quiet. _

He silenced his body with urgency as if it were listening for something precious, searching for the vibrating pulse of the other’s heart beat in sync with his own.

_ Our hearts... _

His mind slipped, finally weightless, into the silence of the air as he reached upward with his heart, coming to the place wherein even the caging of fearful shame disintegrated in its needlessness. 

_ My heart... _

The ribbons that had, in their fastening, carefully held all of the pieces of himself he had kept sealed away fell as the unravelled around what they could no longer contain, and the brilliant, protected truth he had kept concealed inside sprang forth from within, its light growing brighter and brighter as it raced to the realization of Jonghyun’s mind.

_ This feeling, in my heart... _

He lie softly falling further still under the protection of the peace enveloping them, rippled only by the sensation of their heartbeats as each pulsation reached out to one another’s, coyly swirling towards each other in magnetic attraction as if they were dancing flames.  

In this moment, Jonghyun surrendered, his heart finally peaceful and light.

_...is that I like you, Minhyun._


	4. Chapter 4

2012, March 1st.

_I have to find out the truth._

Jonghyun shifted audibly in his rigid chair as quietly fanned the smolders of his faltering determination.  Across from him, a middle aged woman clerically sifted through a large stack of freshly printed papers as she spoke in monologue, discarding each paper in progression across her large oak desk as if they were leaves falling from trees.  He grasped at her seemingly important words as they trailed from him unforgivingly, his rebellious mind pulling away at the seduction of arbitrary thoughts.

Perhaps his mind was simply restless after all, itching to explore the well-remembered streets of his hometown rather than staying cooped up in family friends’ homes, or modest offices such as the one of the saju reader milling through her work an arm’s distance across from him.  

Or rather, what seemed to be more likely at the moment was that his mind seemed to remain fixed on a hidden agenda, both arresting in its notion and diverting in its bashfulness.

_This is probably crazy..._

Jonghyun tightened his knuckles as he clenched his damp palms once again, wrestling with the apprehension in his mind.

_But, after all, I might be crazy too._

“Human relationships, for you, see, it really comes down to your family,” she spoke, her voice dry and medical in contrast to the usual animation of a cheap fortune teller, “See here? This is the influence of the mother...and see the amount of gold in your chart, look here, you see?”  

Jonghyun thoughts questioningly strayed to his mother, waiting a few feet away in the lobby of the small divination office and likely immersed in a combination matching game on her cell phone.  His eyes furrowed as he tried to connect appropriate emphasis to the words the saju reader all too flatly spoke.

“But, see here?  Love...romantic love, won’t be easy for you,” she continued, “as you can see, here...it doesn’t come easily.  I’m not trying to sound too pessimistic here…” She flexed her palm with ambivalence as she spoke, “It either doesn’t come, it’s unrequited, or you can only find love under these circumstances that are simply too painful to bear.”

Jonghyun impulsively blushed as he dropped his head to his lap.

_Love…?_

He bit back his lip in protest against the illustrative fantasies that brushed his imagination.

“Your name too…” she droned forward, “I would say, with your name characters, don’t expect marriage, or expect it if you want, but not sooner than thirty, thirty-five.  It’s because, see here? This is the amount of wood in your chart...see here? You see this right?”

Jonghyun stared blankly ahead at the indecipherable jumble of Chinese characters she now traced with her fingers.  Her equally unreachable eyes paused upon his face, waiting indifferently for him to muster a response.

_Love…_

“Ah...yes,” he responsibly replied, leaning forwards and peering towards the paper as if he were actually able to understand what was printed onto it.

_...is just a daydream, for me._

“Good.  But, even more so, you see...you came here to ask about your career, yes?” she continued.  

“Actually-” Jonghyun attempted to interject.

_They’re just daydreams..._

“This is why!  See, until then, you’ll stay focused on your career.  But, you see, fame won’t come without hard work, no, there will be a lot of effort required on your part.  I can clearly see..” she paused, her eyebrows raising in a cartoonish display of earnesty, “I clearly see you have what it takes.  Stay persistent. I see a lot of success coming in your future…”

_But..._

Jonghyun acquiesced to the voice of the reader filtering throughout the air as he turned his head away.  His eyes caught the view of the outdoors through the small office window, conveniently nestled behind the reader’s face.  

_...Why do I just think about these daydreams?_

The ocean breeze rustled the branches of a young plum tree outside, its sugar pink buds discarding their infant petals in a reluctant dance with the wind.  Beyond the tree fluttering anxiously at the turn of the imminent season, he could see the outline of humble buildings cozily dotting his childhood home of Gangneung.  No sooner than he had stepped him off the bus that brought him there had his mom been busily escorting him between relatives and their place of business, somehow finding time to take him to a saju reading that she insisted upon.  His parents were indeed quite a bit older, cozier in their ways in contrast to many of his peers, and they still believed in the traditional methods of ensuring against misfortune.

_This place feels comfortable to me.  It’s not Seoul, but it has all of my most cherished memories._

“I can see that you’ve lived, it seems like many lifetimes,” the reader said, her eyes still engrossed in the papers at her desk.  “Because you see,” she spoke with the weight in her words shifting as she pointed to another illegible graph, “There’s this empty space.  You haven’t found something you’re still looking for.”

_A place like this..._

Jonghyun nodded slowly as he yearned for the pleasure of being outside on the coast, with the crisp air of the small oceanside town once again carressing his face.  

_I want to come with Minhyun someday._

A slight blush crept over his cheeks as the thought came to him, releasing his bitten lips as a shy, excited smile nipped and teased at the corners.

“In those lifetimes, you never managed to fulfill your purpose, the purpose you carry with you,” she continued,  “That’s why you’re here, now. This is where your imperfections are,” she spoke as if admonishing him for actions he had unconsciously committed.  

_I wonder what he’s doing right now..._

“The years it will take to please your ego, it’s nothing to how long you have spent searching your soul,” the reader continued, solidly oblivious to the bashful fantasies occupying the other’s youthful mind, “It could be in a previous lifetime…” she said, “...In a previous lifetime, I can see here…”  Her eyebrows crunched for but a moment, before uncurling tightly across her face as she took a deliberate breath.

_Minhyun..._

“You died very young then,” she declared matter-of-factly, nodding her head at her own words in affirmation.  The revelation fell from its bravado to a mere ping against Jonghyun’s mind as his eyes glazed in their fixed position towards the outside, the reader’s voice rolling over him as he mulled in his thoughts.  The imperative of his festering anxieties bore deeply into his mind against his cheerful fantasies, causing him to lift his eyebrows in well-timed response to the reader’s canned epiphany as he considered the weight of his predicament.

_Whenever I think of you..._

“That’s why...see, everyone has a time that is their weakest.  For you, this is the time when you will always need to fight the most.  For some of the people on this earth, this happens even in youth, and for you too, even in the spring of youth...You see here?”

_...I have to know why._

Jonghyun focused his eyes back to hers, nodding compliantly.

_No matter what, I have to know why._

“This is what you have to deal with,” she asserted as she pointed at a random glyph on the page, “That’s how it is…see, life is not fair.  At our weakest, that’s when we try to be at our strongest. That’s yin and yang, you see.”

Jonghyun stared silently in response, tilting his head in a small nod.  

_This time, Minhyun, I have to know for sure._

He inhaled deeply as he mentally sized up his courage, a deeply embedded responsibility compelling him as he chased it throughout the corners of his mind.  His body now retracted from its dreaming lazyness as his eyes grew more and more present, focusing on the reader. He silenced the frivolous thoughts dancing throughout his mind as he raced more intently towards the approaching opportunity, his eyes flickering with anticipation upon seeing her begin to shuffle the papers together in motion to end the session.

_I have to know why this is happening.  Only after I find what I’m looking for..._

“If there’s anything unclear to you-” she trailed, distracted in her task of reorganizing the papers by page number as she ignored the visual cues of the small boy fidgeting across from here.

_Only after I absolutely know why..._

“Um..” Jonghyun interjected, his voice crackling and unfamiliar after settling in silence for so long.  

_...Only then can I have that daydream._

“There’s something…” he spoke as his voice stumbled, his body straightening to reach her attention.

“There’s something I’d like to ask...actually.”  

_This might be crazy..._

The reader remained courteously smiling as she continued to gather the stack of papers, thumbing them as she counted their order.  “If there’s anything that’s not clear, there’s everything you need to know if you read these over,” she replied unceremoniously.

“It’s not really about that…” Jonghyun replied as his voice trailed.

_...But here goes nothing._

“What can you tell me, about, um….”  he began, speaking as low and hesitantly as if he were revealing some great secret, “What do you know about….you know, visions?”

The reader paused in her clerical work, her head tilting ever so slightly to the side as her eyes stared at some unknown point at her desk.  “What kind of visions?” she replied, her tone seeming to mask any heightened interest in the unusual question of the other.

“Like...psychic visions,” he responded, probing forward with a determined stare.  Her attention finally had been won as she peered up from the rim of her glasses, meeting his stare with one of her own.  

“What do you want to know about it?” she replied.

Jonghyun softly lowered his eyes as his cheeks betrayingly flushed in embarrassment.

“Is it possible, that...you know…” he responded,  “something could happen to someone that looks like, to them, having a vision that feels something like...a painful memory?”  He dared to lift his head back to hers, courageously ignoring the heat across his face as he continued. “It feels like something you remember, but it hasn’t happened yet.  But then it does...so...you know, it comes true...” he finished with his wavering voice, spending the last of his mustered confidence as he dared his eyes to meet the reader’s directly.  

She leaned back in her leather chair, the fabric crunching helplessly as she crossed her arms in cryptic indifference.

“I suppose, it could very well happen,” she responded as her voice reached across her inquisitive thoughts, “Why?”  

Jonghyun nervously squeezed his fingers into his palms as he shifted uncomfortably in his seat.  “What would someone do if they had a vision, like that…” he paused, leaning forward in an attempt to garnish his words with utmost sincerity, “but it was something bad?  What if you could remember the pain it caused you? Or someone whose pain, you can feel like it’s your own, you know? And, you know...you wanted to kind of avoid it? What would you do?”

The reader chuckled smartly in response, her eyes tucking themselves into the frame of her glasses.

“That’s a question that has a lot of answers.  It really depends. Is this related to an experience you might have had?” she asked with her brows twisted in an almost insincere furrow of concern.

Jonghyun exhaled, keeping his gaze locked to her face.  He felt incessantly foolish in the frame of the unforgiving office chair, and yet, as though he had already crossed some sort of unseen threshold upon which his more practical reservations fell behind, his thoughts spilled from his mouth as if they were confessions.  

“I think so…” he replied, his voice wincing in its uncertainty, “I think something strange is happening to me.  I don’t really know what it is. You’re the only person I thought I could ask…” he faltered.

“Are you having psychic visions?” she asked flatly.

Jonghyun’s breath caught in his throat as he trapped himself in his own confusion, averting his eyes to the side of the room as he gathered his memories of the strange episodes that had been plaguing him for the past couple of months.  

“I have these random flashes of memories I don’t remember happening to me.  But, somehow.. it seems like it’s from the future. Would that count as a psychic vision?” he replied, lowering his gaze to his feet.

“If that’s so…” she replied, “then…perhaps,” the reader responded as her eyes roamed as if she were studying him, keeping the words she spoke frosted with a thin veil of professionalism as she finally failed to conceal her own reactionary thoughts.  

“It could be possible that you’re have some sort of psychic vision,” she continued with careful reservation, “Keep in mind, many people with psychic premonitions have visions that never really came to fruition, so to speak, leading them to believe that the vision was nothing more than a dream or even a hallucination.”

Jonghyun nodded slowly, trying to commit her words to memory as accurately as possible.

“Why wouldn’t they come true?” he replied.

The reader pressed the thinning rim of her golden glasses frame up her nose, her unwavering gaze reaching behind itself to the corner of her mind as her mouth only slightly tightened into a discomforting smile.  

“There’s a variety of reasons,” she replied, “It could be that someone exercised their free will which, naturally, changed the path of the future.  We have all have that capability of course, and that very well could change the outcome of something to make a certain vision never occur.”

Jonghyun leaned back in the chair as the words she spoke to him tumbled around in his head.

_Free will?_

“What if the visions I see,” he responded, his words nearly racing now, “what if I can see, that somehow, they’re happening to me?  How do I know what to do to change the outcome?” Sudden emotion grasped at his throat, wrangling it with their intensity as his eyes spontaneously stung with the imminent threat of frustrated tears.  He squeezed his eyes to blink them back. “I have to know what to do. I absolutely...” he continued, his small voice crackling in its fragile resolve, “I absolutely have to change the outcome.”

The reader hesitated, keeping her eyes on him as the intensity of their exchange silently sneaked past, creeping upwards beyond the prosaic confinement of the office room.  Her voice grew thick and heavy as if placed under weights as her eyes enveloped themselves in contemplation.

“There’s another theory some people believe, although...I think we’re really departing from my area of expertise here…” she trailed off as she hesitantly cocked her head.  Her face transitioned into an expression of deep thought, and Jonghyun found himself inching closer and closer from the end of the chair as if he were physically reeled in.  

She remained quiet for a minute that felt like several before she quietly spoke, the richness of her words indicating the seriousness in which she believed them.

“It could be that these visions, these memories that don’t make any sense to you now...they could be coming from a sort of parallel universe.”

Their eyes pierced at each other as if in joust as the air stilled, sunken by the gravity of the words being spoken.

“A place where you, maybe in some form, once were.  But now you’re here. But for some reason…” she continued as she leaned forward, her eyes locked on Jonghyun’s as if connected with marionette strings.  She hesitated but a moment, lowering the heaviest of emphasis onto the hushed urgency of her words.

“You brought these memories of your parellel life with you, so you could see them again in this life.  For some reason.”

Jonghyun sat in silence as the idea washed upon him.

_A parallel universe?_

“And that reason…” she said, as she dramatically leaned back in her chair, releasing the invisible harness in which the dramatism of her voice had trapped him, “that’s a reason you have to find.”  

As the distance increased between them, her words poured too slowly like cold, thick syrup over the corners of Jonghyun’s small and skeptical mind.  His facial expression fell to confusion as his thoughts jangled together in clattering distress. “But what do I do? Why is this happening? How do I know why this keep happens to me?”

The reader’s gaze dropped to the floor.  She smiled politely as she finally relaxed snakingly into the comforting shell of her leather chair, the fabric again crunching against the weight of her retreat.  “You should probably look into it on your own,” she spoke, her voice now solid with withdrawal as her gaze remained fixed on the floor.

“But, how do I even start?” he asked in exasperation while scrambling to gather the thoughts left drowning at her release, the ideas she planted leaving him feeling more lost than he had been before he started his inquisition.

_This is my only chance to know why..._

“Please…” he called out to her, his voice echoing across the office walls as he raced in desperation to reach her, “Please, help me.”

_I have to know the truth._

Her mouth pursed into a quizzical expression as she furrowed her brow in contemplation.  She grabbed a pen at her desk after a moment of outward clarity, tucking into the packet of papers marked to Jonghyun’s name to write hurriedly in the margin.

“Have you tried asking yourself to reveal them?” she cryptically but curtly replied as she scrawled her memo.  “The world is only limited to what you believe to be possible. And what you believe to be possible is the only thing limiting your world.  That’s a quote I like to tell people.” Lifting the pen as she gave her written words a nod of affirmation, she then pushed the stapled papers towards him as she stood from her chair.  

Jonghyun remained frozen in his position, staring up at her.  His thoughts dispersed as frantically as he reached to grab them.  Suddenly, he was overcome with a foolish self-consciousness, as if their shifting of postions had just broken him from a deep trance.

“Do you believe me?” he asked in pleading monotone, his eyes fixed onto the reader.

The reader met his glance in calculation, her outstretched arm remaining rigid.  

“I don’t have a reason not to.  It’s your dollar, really,” she replied.

Jonghyun released the tension in his shoulders and finally relented his glance to find itself on the floor in defeat.  “Too honest for you?” she asked with a courteous, yet immutable smile.

The aftermath of thoughts rushed through his veins like blood as he offered the reader an absent smile and quietly exited the unassuming office room.  He anearly could not hear the sound of his mother’s voice warmly greeting him in the modest waiting room as he frantically searched into the packet, his eyes landing at the message the reader had scribbled down:

_“There is no pain in the future.  Go back to the past!”_

 

\--

 

The rustling breeze of impending Spring stilled to an unnatural quiet in the late hours of the night as the modest walls of Jonghyun’s small and unpretentious Gangneung family home stood faithfully still.  Jonghyun had long lost track of time as he kneeled on the floor in the center of his childhood bedroom. Again he clenched his fists, pressing into the floor as if he could somehow blast off like a rocket, forcing his thoughts as they screamed in his head out into the silence.

_I want to know.  I want to know everything!_

Jonghyun commanded with all of his absurdity and sincerity as as his breathing grew thick with concentration, now coming out in audible huffs as his eyes squeezed themselves shut.  

_Show me the visions..._

The white in his knuckles spidered out from their hard tips, spreading like a wave over the reddening of his tightly clenched fists.  Tears extrapolated by force began to fall from his tightly clenched eyelids as they pressed with all their might into the outline of his small, youthful face.  

_Show me the future!!!!!!!_

After a forcible minute, his breath, ragged with the climax of willpower, slowly began to rattle as it slowed, his eyelids decrunching from their stressed position and his jaw slackening to relax itself, the strength of his relaxed breath pushing itself out with small effort.

_Nothing._

“Well...whatever,” he sighed, chuckling slightly in arbitrary gratefulness that no one was witness to his experiment.  

As he had for what felt like countless times already that night, he complied with his body to retreat from yet another failed attempt at willfully inducing visions, feeling increasingly skeptical and foolish at the saju reader’s advice.  Diverting from his embarrassment, his eyes unceremoniously drifted away in matter-of-fact defeat as he looked around the room.

The comforting bedroom space, rich in memory of his childhood, evoked hazy and pleasant pictures of past times.  His thoughts quieted as they found themselves at peace in their reminescence over the life he had once lived between these walls.  He sighed in bittersweet contentment as his mind continued to unravel from its tension. After all, it was a life he had left behind, following the calling of something he had thought greater that what was offered to him in the pleasant town of Gangneung.  He smiled to himself as he straightened his body up from the floor.

_I guess these memories are all I have for now._

Jonghyun outstretched his arms to the ceiling, yawning in discovery of a sleepiness that had snuck up on him during his adventures in psychic induction.  His footsteps peppered the floor lightly as he moved towards the dresser to change into his sleeping clothes. He stretched the well-worn fabric of the white t-shirt across his golden skin as he ruminated the words the reader had left him.

_“There is no pain in the future.”_

As his legs billowed into the snugness of his soft pajama pants, the cryptic message she wrote down rolled about in his mind, seemingly insoluble by his tired and inexperienced mind.  

_That can’t be..._

He roamed the bedroom gingerly as he now paced from side to side, nearly forgetting to take care against rustling his sleeping parents on the other side of the house.  

_There was pain._

He voicelessly mouthed the words into the silence as he thought them.

_How do I go back to the past?_

Flashbacks of the conversation he had earlier played in his ears as though they were sound bytes, carressing his mind in a frenzied and chaotic order.

_“A parallel universe….”_

He froze in his stance at the side of the room, his mind arrested by phantom echoes as words coated the walls.

_“...For some reason.”_

Jonghyun bit his lip.  Despite the superficial embarrassment with which he remembered the reader’s suggestions, seeming now as nonsensical as his subsequent attempts to follow her woo, he still hadn’t been able to fully let go of the words she spoke earlier that day,

_But then, why?_

His body found the edge of his bed while his mind remained in its daze.  The mere idea of the existence of a dimension other than the one he was currently standing in had not had such a terrifying effect on his youthful mind as it might have before the visions. Now, rather, it seemed to Jonghyun instead as if he was finally considering that which his subsconscious had already embraced, the truth that gathered at the edge of his mind as he now began to furrow deeper to the source of the strange visions he had seen.  

_What happened to me?_

He cocked his head as if dipping his mind in his thoughts, his brows laying pressed against his eyes when, suddenly, the vibration of his cell phone plucked him from his stupor.  His thoughts cascaded back to the present as he grabbed it and absently pressed the button besides the screen. As it lit up he peered at the message displayed across the crackled interface.

“Hyung~”

“Are you sleeping already, hyung?”

He squinted through the display, fractured and broken from careless accidents as a relieved smile worked to erase his troubled expression.

_Minhyun._

The smile across his face remained blissfully as he thought about the lingering conversations they had been having for the past four days, sometimes stretching for hours each night as they both clutched their phones at their face, fingers nipping at the screen as if to grasp at the distance between them.  The tiny flutter in his heart every time a message from Minhyun arrived remained a precious and cherished secret, his nervous happiness radiating across the room in the security of isolation.

“Nah,” he replied, “What are you doing now?”

“Hm~” Minhyun replied, “I want to talk, but I might fall asleep.  I’m so tired today...”

_It’s okay Minhyun..._

“Just sleep Minhyun-ah~!  Hyung will sleep too,” he wrote back, his heart both dancing and smoldering with pleasurable disappointment that their conversation mightn’t continue further.  He cozied himself with the feeling of gratification in his heart, letting his eyes flutter closed as his tired body laid into the aging mattress.

_...I have to make sense of everything first, anyway._

His sweetened thoughts came tangled with the reminiscence of the visions he had had, starting from the very moment Minhyun had come into the house.  Jonghyun had somehow knew, either from assumption or remembrance, that the visions that plagued him always seemed connected to the younger boy; the same boy whose incongruous positivity and resilience beckoned Jonghyun mercilessly.

_Minhyun-ah…_

His heart singed from beneath with the more deeply protected feelings he harbored towards the younger boy, a quiet and slow burning pain he had come to appreciate as it stayed eternally tucked into the small of his heart.

_I’ll do anything to stop that from happening to us…_

His head sank to the pillow as his cheeks burned with a blush now freed from its inhibition.  In the fragility of his young mind, he had come to both accept what he had now admitted to himself and also fight to keep it concealed to his heart, as if letting such a precious emotion be touched by the dark, spindly hands of rationale would cause it to wilt and spoil.

_The pain and suffering…_

Jonghyun lay partnered with the flush of his cheeks in the still of the night as he mulled over his heart’s most secret desires.  He had long ago understood, as he felt his body drift into the lull of slumber, that the odds were never likely for his feelings to ever be realized towards the other, and yet, some part of him wanted to keep this otherworldly guardianship of the young, cheerful other boy, now peacefully dreaming in somewhere in Busan, for himself.  It was as if, to his mind, protecting Minhyun was some sort of secret pact he had made with God long ago.

_...I’ll do everything I can to stop you from hurting._

Jonghyun cradled this wish in his heart as he let all other thoughts fall away, relenting his body to its comfort.  Drawing breath that filled him deeper and deeper, he released his body to the waiting grasp of sleep.

He lay, still and conscious, for an uncountable period of time.

As he lay awake, making itself known slowly and yet without mistake, he began to notice a pinhole sized light directly in the center of his vision.

His eyes shot open into the darkness of the night, and yet the light remained in position, oscillating ever so slightly as if someone were drilling through his retina on the other side of consciousness.  Jonghyun’s exhalation carefully crept by its presence, which was now growing larger and larger as his eyes remained fearfully fixed upon it.

As realization crept over his mind, the familiar rush began.

A pounding static exploding upwards from the silence rushed towards him as if it were waves from the ocean, filling his ears as if he were under the rushing water, and bringing with it the unmistakable presence of an echoing voice that spoke in an automaticity that Jonghyun fully understood to be distinct from his own thoughts.

The voice called out in fragments as if the sounds were made of combusting neurons, echoing louder and louder upon itself as the roaring static pressed harder into the crevices of Jonghyun’s ears.

_Come._

As if his more practical urges just began to kick in, a fundamental panic flooded his mind.  He tried to force his eyes away, but found them now divorced from his command. The voice he heard seemed to be his own, but yet, seemed to be coming from a place beyond his physical control.  Like the visions he had seen, it felt like something that was both his own and not.

_I have to know why..._

The breath that had been seized by fear a moment ago was now ragged with the aggressive release of anticipation.  Mustering all of the strength and bravery of a teenage boy, he relaxed his body, whispering into the silence the comforting words that would not reach his ears.

“I have to know.”

Crushed under the unyielding weight of inevitability, he intrepidly focused his mind’s eye into the growing light.  Upon his attention, the light stretched out into ribbons that reached out around him, as if he were being pulled by an invisible rope up through a long and deep well.  His body felt uncomfortably pressed into the bed as if it were trying to push through the layers of the earth below him. He remained still and compliant as the light continued to usher him forth towards what was now unraveling into a large beam, as purely golden as if it were bursting from the heavenly sky itself.

Jonghyun swallowed his scattered thoughts as his ears rung with deafening sounds he had never before heard, fragmenting from the prism of another place and time.  He felt his physical facilities fall gently away as he crossed from some state to the other, a threshold over which he was finally brought while hand-in-hand with this mysterious force.

“Tell me…”

Jonghyun uttered his prayer at a feverous intensity as his vision became fully blinded with the searing golden light that caressed him.

“Tell me the truth.”

Upon climax, the light pulled backwards, leaving an empty landscape in its shadow.  Among the fragmented golden rays, he could make out the figure of a person standing in front of him, details becoming more and more apparent as the light retreated further.  Jonghyun’s breath quickened as the figure seemed to be rapidly moving closer and closer, as if he himself were levitating above the ground moving rapidly beneath his feet.

_The truth._

The voice in which he spoke to himself seemed impossibly fractured, as if it were coming from two different sources, remarkably separate, but somehow united in their essence.  

Jonghyun faced forward, gazing into the eyes of this person who stood before him.  

The person was, unquestionably, himself.

Jonghyun stared back as fear kissed with wonder.

The universally peaceful expression on his face, an expression that still could not manage to ease the additional traces of age and hardship he had clearly carried at his own point on the map of time, remained unwavering as he gazed calmly forward into the Jonghyun of the present.

_Me?_

Spontaneously, as if acting from the depth below his consciousness, he leaped forward.

As he did so, the image before him shattered.

Particles of images that seemed like shredded memories were now racing past him as if they were a million small meteors, agitating in their imminent return to empty space.  Caged into these sparkling fragments of time, a clattering of distorted voices called to him. He frantically searched around him to gather the wailing screams that tightly gripped his ears, feeling compelled towards them intuitively, as if their beckoning had been long established in a place beyond time.

_The truth._

A scene drew before him in fragments that were rapidly pulling together from the scattering lights surrounding him, as if the image were being reflected through broken mirror glass.  The sounds and images raced towards the sky, meeting together on the path of time as they clattered angrily upon their converging.

_“Hyung…”_

The outside sky appearing above Jonghyun now flashed as if lights were rapidly flickering, stars sublimating against the skyscape as they became drawn by unlocked memory.  Before him, the small voice seemed to be moving backwards as if returning to its origin, tucking itself into the mouth of the younger boy in front of him.

_Minhyun._

He commanded his body to move forth, and yet the image of Minhyun’s face seemed ever far from reach, as if he were simply viewing the other from behind a screen.  Jonghyun’s heart filled with a planted ache as he unavailingly reached out to the face of the boy whose eyes sparkled back against the stars of the night.

_“...Let me have this one wish.”_

“Minhyun-ah,” Jonghyun called, his voice silenced by a time barrier stronger than his abilities as his yearning fell to silence, “Minhyun.”

_The feeling in my heart…_

Jonghyun’s eyes widened as his cheeks flushed in panicked embarrassment.  “Minhyun...” he choked into the quiet air of his bedroom, his throat gargling to free itself from it’s entrapment as memories of both recent and unmanifest lifetime intertwined in front of his eyes.

_...is that I like you._

Jonghyun’s heart fell from its balance as humiliation and shame flooded him like poison.  He attempted to avert his eyes but the images of his secret desires were relentless in their assault, pressing themselves into the folds of his eyelids as if they were branding them with molten rods.  

“Stop…” he whispered, his cheeks burning red from the deepest, most shameful passion he harbored in his heart.

_“Jonghyun…”_

The voice of Minhyun pressed further into his shame.  Jonghyun fought to do something other than watch on as the faint sensation of falling snow tickled at his skin, the sensation dainty against the clatter of his racing heart.  Minhyun stood hesitantly before him, and the breath between them seemingly stilled to a complete silence as the younger boy pleaded.

_“Let me be by your side…”_

The words gripped Jonghyun’s heart with paralyzing fear as he stared helplessly in return.  “Minhyun…” he fruitlessly called again, the tortured eyes of the other taunting him to hysteria.

_“...A little more than anyone else...”_

“Minhyun….” he repeated, his eyes welling with tears that pillowed at the bottom of his shock-widened eyes.

_“...Let me have this one wish.”_

Tears relenquished and fell from his eyes, near indistinguishable with the drops of melted snowflakes disintegrating onto his skin.  His eyes fluttered as his crying obscured his vision, his body disobeying his every command to stay close to the younger boy, whose distraught figure faded like falling ash into the blackness as pixels of random light chased Minhyun from Jonghyun’s eyes.  

“Please, Minhyun...” he pleaded, the twisting pain of fear searing his heart as he called out in futility to the invisible power that had arrested him.  

Voices that screamed from the dark overtook the precious one of Minhyun’s as the younger boy disappeared among the sparkling lights.  His mind frantically searched for the other, calling out in his mind as he pushed back against the current of his racing mind drowning against the rush of visions now swirling throughout his body.

_ Minhyun... _

“Minhyun…” Jonghyun called, “Minhyun-ah...where are you…”  Jonghyun choked a small, petrified sob as the pixels raced forward, swirling forth as they drew another image apparent in front of his eyes. 

_ “Jonghyun…” _

“Minhyun-ah!” he called frantically, his voice absent of volume as sensations of a foreign yet searing pain crushed his small body.

_ “How could this happen to us?” _

Jonghyun found Minhyun’s face drawn from the dancing lights as it returned to him, mangled and distorted.  Minhyun’s face was bludgeoned by sorrow as it contorted into a foreign expression of extreme anguish, as the other boys stood by, their bodies towering over the two as if they were menacing shadows.  

Jonghyun tried to scream in terror, but his mouth stayed as closed as if it had been erased from his face as he stared in shock at the scene before him.

_ “Just, tell me.  Tell me this isn’t true, please tell me something like this isn’t happening to us…” _

Minhyun’s ragged voice tumbled out of his mouth as it wrestled free from the greiving rage inside him.  Jonghyun fixated his tear-stained face on the other as he stupefyingly watched the other sobbing almost hysterically.  “Minhyun…” he choked silently as tears dampened his face.

_ Everything was all my fault. _

Jonghyun’s own displaced thoughts filled his ears, echoing in distortion.  

“No…” he whispered, “This can’t be...”

The fallen tears between the two boys liquified the floor into a molten spiral that splashed against the walls enclosing him.  Nausea gripped his chest as the tears began to overflow, pressing veins in his eyes as if they were to burst. Minhyun stared into the eyes of the other boy as his tear-welled eyes emanated a certain evil that pulled Jonghyun closer and closer towards the abyss that lay below.

_ Everything... _

“No,” he sobbed, the murky remembrance of agony throbbing underneath his skin as if what had once been buried and forgotten were finally awakening to the call of revival.

_ Everything was all my fault. _

Jonghyun’s mind rushed for escape as he gagged for breath, pushing against the body that entrapped him.  Tensing every muscle in his body as if lifting up against the weight of planets crushing each limb, he dragged his physical body upwards, pressing with superhuman strength against the barrier of time as it unbearably tightened its grip around his head.  Feeling for the bed beneath his fingers, he glanced downwards into the vision, losing his balance as he tipped into the spiral beneath him. 

The screaming figures from the darkness closed in upon him, sealing him into the sinking spiral as he fell helplessly into the abyss.

_ Remember.   _

He gasped, his constricted and raspy breath gargling from his throat as the flood of remembrance poisoned his eyes from their irises.  “Everything,” he repeated, the pixelated, angry visions stabbing his eyes repeatedly like broken glass shards. “Everything was my fault…”  Buried memories flew from coffins where they had once been sentenced to lie in eternity. His face paled as he let go of his strength, feeling his body pulled menacingly into the underworld, deafening sounds collapsing onto his ears as he surged below.

_ Everything. _

The wailing sounds of the deep rattled in his ears as Jonghyun whimpered in sobs.  An overwhelming sense of despair overtook him, chaining him to the clattering memories displaced in time and space.

_ “Minhyun.”  _

Jonghyun’s own voice haunted at his mind as he searched desperately for its origin.  His vision raced forward into the hollow shell of an older Jonghyun, laying on a blanket of warm summer grass that tickled his arms as he shifted.  Alongside him, Minhyun lay with his body curled lifelessly on the ground as he pleaded to him with tear-streaked eyes. 

_ “It’s different this time...Jonghyun…It’s different now...” _

Jonghyun fell silent in the deafening sadness, exhaustingly embracing the sensation of tangled guilt that dragged his body downwards with crushing gravitational force.  Minhyun’s soft and light voice floated effervescently above the tormenting pain that made itself apparent over his now less youthful face. Jonghyun leaned in towards the other, his hand reaching out to touch the other boy, whose toned and muscular body seemed discordantly hollow, crumpled by depression and empty rage.

_ “...It’s like it’s finally too much to bear…” _

Jonghyun itched as if his skin was screaming to rip from his body, furious swelling suffocating his eyes and pressuring each vein to bursting as tears continued to fall down his face.  “Minhyun…” he pleaded to himself, “Minhyun, no...”

_ “I’m sorry…Hyung...I’m so sorry.” _

Minhyun tucked his head into Jonghyun’s shoulder, the hot and ragged breath of the other purposefully tickling at his neck as his breaths drew ragged and slow.  Jonghyun sobbed as the prickling sensation of an intentional sin nipped at his body, the degradation of his sordid desires unfolding as he turned towards the other.

_ Remember… _

Jonghyun tightened his fists as he choked a broken sob.  “Please, no…” he begged, as the scene before him unfolded mercilessly, burning his heart with shame.

_ “Why does it hurt this bad?  Tell me hyung…” _

Jonghyun shivered at the violation of his most private feelings, the guilt of his submission crashing degradation upon his head as his body betrayed him.  He leaned into the sensation of Minhyun’s face next to him, feeling Minhyun’s nose trail lightly upwards from his neck to his cheek. The feelings of pleasure humiliated him as he watched on, powerless to stop the vision in all of its gathered strength.  

_ “It’s my fault, Minhyun-ah.  Everything.” _

“No…” he whispered voicelessly, the echoing of his distant voice stealing the sound from his throat.  Minhyun shifted his body on top of the other, ragged breaths of immorality dancing between them as the cloak of secret shame fell upon them.

_ I broke my promise. _

Minhyun’s reaching figure began to disintegrate to sand that swirled away into the darkness, the thickness of the vision suddenly pierced by a screaming, black guilt that clawed out from the face of Minhyun as it rapidly closed in on his own.

_ I couldn’t change anything. _

The vision disintegrated with an echoing shriek as it swept into blackness.  Jonghyun clutched the edge of the bed with whitened knuckles as the ashes of the memory swept past his eyes, his body shaking slightly as he drew ragged breaths, wet in his throat from choked tears.

_ Why couldn’t I change anything? _

His own anguished thoughts read themselves aloud to him from their imprisonment, the sounds of their wailing exhausting his ears.  The skin around his eyes bulged outward from the swelling of panicked and humiliated tears that saturated his face as they fell to his lap.  

_ “...What if this is the end?” _

The spiral that dragged him mercilessly downward began to slow as the voices clattering around him fell in unison with his own.  Once concealed memories seemed to be returning from a certain exile to the unmanifest, finding their places in the corners of Jonghyun’s mind and moving within him as his heart broke under their weight.  Weakness cascaded upon his body as the creeping sense of foreknowledge throbbed in his shivering mind.

_ The future we wanted... _

“The future…” Jonghyun raspily breathed, his eyes rolling backwards as he closed his inflated eyelids, sealing between them the vision of utter sorrow that violently painted themselves on his enclosed eyes.

_...This could be our only chance. _

Jonghyun’s eyes focused on the appearing vision of his much older self, now standing anxiously in front of large cameras as he wore his sorrow upon his face like a sentence, isolated from the strangers beside him as he held forth the tatters of what had been his dream, sunken by failure and left to rot by neglect of faith. 

“This is the future,” he whispered to himself in the deceptive stillness of the bedroom, the confinement of his small voice ricocheting off the corners of his own ears as they failed to reach the menacing shadows of strangers surrounding him, their eyes mocking him as their faces twisted into monstrous, evil expressions.  A despairing rage angrily clawed open his chest as the dark hands of injustice grasped tightly at his throat.

_ “The #1 rank belongs to…” _

“It’s just…” he whispered, drawing sharp, suffocated breaths as he forced the words from his quivering body, “just sadness….”

_ “Kim Jonghyun… “ _

“It’s just failure….” he whimpered as he sobbed.  His name echoed throughout the large room that somehow felt as if it held all the pain of his life thus far within it, the sound of his wailing sobs dissonantly ringing against the eruption of cheers around him.  The hands of others that reached out at his hollow body dissolved to blackness, their fingers barely reaching him before blowing away as dust.

_ “Minhyun-ah... we’ll make it there together.  Just like I promised. It’s our destiny.” _

His own voice blistered his ears as it violated his headspace.  Jonghyun leaned forward into his lap, pressing his forehead to his knees.  “Please…” he begged, his throat gargling sobs from within his collapsed body as he rolled forward.

_ We might finally reach that goal…. _

“Please, God,” Jonghyun cracked as he stared forward, eyes bulging in the pain of utter rejection, “Please no...”

_ The one we tried to since we were all put together, with our hands stretched to the sky…. _

As his body tumbled to the wooden floor, his heart sank from his chest, falling through the bottom of the room and returning to the earth below.  “Please, let me have this…this one thing...” he begged in desperate prayer. 

_ Minhyun-ah, we’ll finally reach that goal together. _

The translucent strands of hope disappeared ruthlessly to the chaos of darkness, and fragments of happiness floated from him towards the sky as if they were petals in the breeze.  “Don’t take this away…just this...” he pleaded as his cheek kissed the cool ground beneath him.

_ “There’s no way you can continue.” _

Inevitablity mercilessly rocketed through Jonghyun’s spine as it contorted in pain, forcing a gutteral scream from his throat.

_ “...Something like this looming on our backs….” _

His eyes watched on helplessly, crumbling in strength as if they had been finally weathered by tears, as he watched the once cherished hope brutally plucked from his heart.  Anger and betrayal lunged at Jonghyun’s throat, searing emotions into the walls of his insides with explosive bursts as if each word were water drops hitting hot oil.

_ “What about our protection?  You’re not the one who needs protecting here….” _

“How could they…” he whimpered to himself, pressing his fists to the ground.

_ “We’re treating you generously...” _

“How could they lie to us...to everyone?”  Flashes of the other members, of strangers, and of people he loved all melted like ice, disintegrating onto the surface of his defeat and seeping indistuingishably into the surface of its cruelty.

_ “You can’t win against them.” _

Jonghyun whimpered at the pain of each vision’s brutality, watching both his past and future self fight his own futility as his body ached in a defeated sadness.  Flashes of those tattered memories of betrayal fell forward on him as he powerlessly lay beneath the weight of them. In another fragment, drawing itself in taunting at the corner of his eye, a distant stranger leered at him with a facial expression gleeful with oppression.

_ “What kind of son would you be to make your mother cry like that?” _

“No...” Jonghyun screamed through tears into the painful emptiness of his childhood bedroom.  “That’s not fair!” The words rang out in solitude as he struggled to reach through the barrier of space and time.  His own unanswered sorrow rang against his ears in harmony the evil revelry of injustice, the clanging of the two joyously celebrating the reign of chaos.  

“I can’t...I can’t change anything...” he whispered as the visions swirled downwards into the blackness, sinking further into the waters of defeat.  His mind raced maniacally to another vision where the tattered figure of his older self now stood in piteous tears.

_ I can’t stand alongside you now, Hwang Minhyun. _

“No!!!” Jonghyun commanded emptily, helplessly, pressing his voice into the floor as if it could reach through to the imperceptible.  The tears streaming down his face scalded his eye sockets as his body could no longer absorb the violent anger.

_ Our dream...the dream we reached for side by side… _

Jonghyun’s mouth fell agape as the sobs now gleefully uncaged resounded their victory from the barrels of his ragged throat.  He squeezed his eyes shut as if they could somehow muster up the power to stop the images that assaulted him.

_ Our hands that reached up towards the sky….. _

He tried to speak, to shout anything to the heavens, as if his voice could somehow reach the dimension in which his soul had been soaked in brutality, but his voice fell into garbled sounds of sorrow, and his eyes succumbed to posession by the tears stolen from the memory of his older self as if they were wiped from the past.

_ "Minhyun-ah.... I’m so sorry…. I won’t make it to that dream with you." _ .

The tears from memories intertwined tears from the present as both streamed from Jonghyun’s small face, deformed with sorrow in each dimension.  He sobbed through them with trapped breath, his heart trampled from the incessant lamentation enclosing onto him from both ends of the path of time.

_ “You never really noticed…” _

Minhyun’s reply rocked Jonghyun’s body as if it were a bullet, its resonance stinging as if his skin were branded with fire.  Jonghyun’s tear-stained face fell into his hands in defeat.

_ “...That I was never as naive as you thought I was.” _

“No…” he spoke, uttering his futile resistance as his eyes rolled upward in surrender.

_ “Jonghyun… I’m no longer going to cry.  I’m not in pain anymore.” _

“Stop, please…”

_ I can’t even change anything. _

The agony unleashed from the memory surged forth as it pummeled Jonghyun’s throat, grasping it tightly as he choked for air.  He collapsed under the weight of it, his body now begging for breath as it twisted on the floor.

_ Minhyun… _

The disintegrating memory of Minhyun’s abandonment fluttered towards the sky as a freed spirit, as his mind raced forward, finally, to the vision he knew all too well, finding himself lifelessly standing on that stage as Minhyun rushed to depart from him.

_ Minhyun-ah…Don’t forget. _

Jonghyun grasped at his body as it felt crushed from all sides, anger and grief dancing in evil courtship while surging through his body like electric current.  He gagged in a frantic attempt to breathe through his sobs while his mind screamed out to charge forward, to run away. 

_ “Hwang Minhyun!!” _

And yet he remained, frozen in his stance, choking out tattered sounds that rose to screaming pitch now as the visions pinned him relentlessly to his helplessness in reality, forcing his mind with its fist to the incessant pain he had tried once to seal away forever.

_ Look back. _

_ Don’t forget me. _

Jonghyun screamed out piercing sobs as his legs curled, battered and bruised from kicking against the floor.  His back arched over his knees as his forehead fell towards the ground, arching in searing pain as if every vessel in his body were exploding one by one.  A white blindness seared his eyes as the scattered pictures fell from his sight.

_ Surrounded by golden lights. _

“Please, God…” he prayed again in vain, the utterances continuing to fall immediately to their defeat against the wall of sensory arrest crushing his body from within.  He curled his body in the pain of his own sorrow, the sorrow that consumed his older self, and the sorrow awaiting him in the future. As he prayed fervently for himself to survive, chaos gripped at the last of his hope, sending shivers through his body as the shards of his existence drifted towards the sky.

_ Sleep... _

Jonghyun even felt it himself, in the soul that connected each part of him, that the pain would soon be over.  The threshold entering the loop of space and time would be crossed yet again, as it might have been countless times before.

_ I wonder, right now, if this is what everyone feels in the moments before they die. _

“No..”  Jonghyun whispered.

_ I wonder when they will find… _

Aching sobs fought upwards from his sore throat, his trachea burning with overshoot as his now spent body released onto the floor.  Grief that had no dominion smashed the willpower of every fiber in his body as he curled his bruised knees to his chest, his hands tightly balled into fists as they rose to his face.

_...My last letter.  The letter I left at the desk in the dorm.  The letter that explains how sorry I am… _

“No...” he prayed fervently as the remaining fragments of his heart exploded further into unretrievable shatters.  His spine slithered in realization of the most painful memory he now saw sealed away from himself; despair so deep that he could not even understand, and yet had already enveloped his future self, pulling his destiny into its final abyss with its ugly spiraling hands.

_...that I couldn’t change anything.  Why couldn’t I change anything? _

The weight of despair that had once been built up for years mercilessly crashed onto his sixteen year old body as if sorrow was pressing him through the earth.  He grasped at the floor as he tried to lift his exhausted body, leaving trails in the floor with his scraping nails as he clawed.

_ Wouldn’t people accept it? _ _ I’d be dead. _

“Don’t...”  he pleaded, sinking his fingernails further into the floor as he pulled his debilitated body forward.

_ It’s better than going on living. _

“No...” his voice creaked as the powerlessness that pressed upon him tangled his body into distorted paralysis, “Please.”

_ God… _

“God...” Jonghyun spoke in unison with the vision as he choked on his unceasing tears, gagging as his knuckles grasped white against the floor.

_ Minhyun… _

“Please...” 

_ I wish I could have changed everything. _

_ Like you did. _

The last of the strength remaining in his body broke from his chest as it floated to the heavens, leaving his empty body laying warm with exhaustion on the cool, wooden floor.  His breathing stilled as the presence of his physical self sank deeper and deeper into the ground.

Jonghyun stared straight ahead into the distance.  

The once anxious and searching eyes of a young boy, someone softly looking through his subconscious for answers, were swallowed in the depths of his hollow black irises as they pierced the wall.

Those eyes, it seemed, would never return, for he found now what he had been looking for.


End file.
